


Mortification

by Nym



Series: Madness For Two [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, The Master Has Issues, Unreliable Narrator, Whump, masterversary, telepathic hanky-panky, the doctor has issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:54:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 24,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28263471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nym/pseuds/Nym
Summary: The Doctor's attempt to free the Master from the Cyberium turns out to be kill or cure. With his life in the Doctor's hands the Master is in two minds.In the Vault, Missy tries to survive without breaking her promises. It costs her more than the Doctor seems to understand.
Relationships: The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Series: Madness For Two [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2070453
Comments: 45
Kudos: 50





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Loving the Master's 50th anniversary? Check out my growing [ **collection of Master-themed fanfic recs**](https://master.fannishly.com). I'll be adding to it during 2021.

Take a breath now. In. Hold. And out. Oxygen sparking cellular energy, lungs expelling the filthy by-products of carbon-based life. You'll live for another minute.

She's watching with a wary eye—proprietorial, prepared to swoop in at the first sign of your faltering beyond recovery. With a name like 'Doctor' you'd think she'd cultivate a bedside manner, but no. You've spent eighteen long hours retching your guts up and then another six willing yourself not to, while the Doctor just watches. Waits. If you want her sympathy, you'll have to reach out and beg. You don't. Slumped face-down over a bio-bed, hand shielding your eyes from the too-bright infirmary lights, your existence is moment-to-moment. You measure your lifespan in individual breaths. Slow. In and out. Air fills you—the hollow places where body and mind are raw. This time you hold the breath and refuse to let it go, holding on until your head begins to pound—until the act of defiance triggers an involuntary response and forces out the noxious gases, dragging in a fresh delivery of life.

"That was childish," she observes. You half-raise a trembling arm and flip the bird in her direction. "Lie down before you fall down."

It takes you far too long to remember that your feet are still on the floor. Your top half succumbed to the lure of being horizontal, but when the Doctor tried to haul the rest of you up onto the bed, you threw her across the room. Turns out that was your last trip back from the sanitation cubicle—the last of staggering back and forth with your dignity in tatters and your intestines in crippling knots. You never want to move again.

Kill or cure. The jury's still out, but on the whole, you'd back the Doctor to win and, thus, yourself to survive the night. It's personal between her and Cyber-kind, after all—they've inflicted rare losses, wounds that she never heals. She could, but she doesn't. Punishing herself with the sharp edges of razorwire memory. You get that.

Something in the bio-readings finally satisfies her that the cure has done its work. She presses a hypospray to your neck.

"That should help."

It does. You no longer have to fight your gag-reflex from second to second—your body's misplaced rebellion against a cure that's worse than the disease. Or less dignified, anyway. Wouldn't surprise you if she designed it this way to punish you. She was all about teaching you lessons, wasn't she, back when you were weak enough to reach for her pity? You begged friendship, and the Doctor locked you up for going-on eighty years. Solitude, enforced stillness—his presence without his company. This is that all over again. The Doctor pretends not to love this power over you, but there's a notable brushstroke of contempt to the composed set of her mouth: you deserve this bad medicine.

Maybe that's true.

Oily, dead silver begins leaking from your pores and, frankly, every orifice. Head pillowed on your arm, you watch your hand—the slow seep of death from the sweat-glands at your fingertips. Micro to macro—prickly, glistening beads of foreign matter merge into a decomposing trickle across the back of your hand.

"Look," you say, fascinated. "You killed it. It's swimming around in me, all dead." You're dizzy, the room swirling around you. Like most things, the Cyberium felt better going in than coming out. You blink—blurred vision. Toxic, molten-lead tears burn random pathways down your cheeks to stain the cuff of your shirt.

Is she even listening? You have to look—to invite the familiar pain of learning that she's slipped away whilst you're bleeding. Well, oozing. But the Doctor's where you left her, where she's spent most of the past cycle—standing in the doorway a few feet away, impassive, untouchable, ready. Waiting to see if you live or die.

There's a chair, and she brought a book. She doesn't sit. She doesn't read.

You break first, your knees giving way, spilling you to the hard floor. Almost. She's there before impact—too late to keep you upright, so she goes down with you instead, a graceful sweep onto one knee, arms folding around your torso to lower you the rest of the way into her lap. It's so smooth, you might have rehearsed it together.

"Damn," you mutter. The taste of death is on your lips, but it's not your own. Turning your head away from her, you spit silver on the decking, half expecting it to etch the metal with an acid hiss—to dissolve your tooth-enamel on its way out, out of sheer spite. You would if the positions were reversed. "Was this supposed to happen?"

"How should I know?"

Go for it and hope, that's the Doctor's motto. It's not the first time you've been one of her experiments. You'll get her back when it's her turn—when she has to come to you and beg for your brilliance.

Abruptly, in her arms, you're conscious of the disgusting state you're in—soaked in sweat and far worse, the poison coming out of you sour and stinking of alchemical vapours and rotting garlic. She doesn't care, of course she doesn't; she holds your head, grips your arm—keeps you close as if she's incapable of revulsion. Too good for that. Too pure, too holier-than-thou to acknowledge anything so mundane as your wretched humiliation.

Just here and now, you're too worn out to care. You slip down into her lap, your head on her thighs, and shut your eyes. It's the first restful moment you can remember in... feels like forever.

"You're a bloody awful doctor, _Doctor_ ," you complain, just in case it's the last word, then surrender your stubborn grip on consciousness and leave your life in her hands.


	2. Chapter 2

There was a day. The Vault, early on. You still ached in your bones from getting executed, and self-doubt gnawed at your memory of begging— _begging him_ —on your knees for the chance to go on living. A long time ago, you chose death rather than the Doctor's idea of captivity. It was a no-brainer. How had you come to this? This version of the Doctor that you'd cultivated, shaped, taught, gifted, kissed, saved—how was it _you_ on your knees, begging for scraps?

He found you tucked into one corner of the room. Then, the Vault was smaller on the inside, before two dimensional-engineers and a TARDIS put their minds to making it some sort of a thousand-year home. A perfect, dull-metallic cube with rounded internal corners. Everything smooth and featureless—so frictionless that the surfaces wouldn't even reward you with the sensation of touch when you ran your fingertips over walls and floor, craving stimulation. He found you on your backside, your knees to your chin, skirts rucked up so your petticoat showed, _not_ crying.

"It'll get better," he promised, sinking to one knee in front of you. Great stick-insect of a Doctor, all elbows and sharpened edges. Like you. What you saw in his eyes that day is what the Doctor calls 'kindness'. He lifted your chin. Smiled the old smile, a flash of teeth and knowing mischief—the one that lifts your hearts and tortures you with hope. "Weapons. Everything. _Now_."


	3. Chapter 3

At some point—after the oozing but before the worst of the pain—there's a shower to wash away the mess.

The Doctor props you against the wall of the cubicle, your palms, forearms and forehead pressed to the warm metal, and strips you of the last of your clothing. Shirt, vest, trousers, underwear. She talks to you as she works—speaks gently enough, considering, but her words mean nothing. You don't even bother to remember them.

You're so weak. She offers to let you sit on a shelf extruded from the wall. You eye it resentfully and stay where you are, rubber knees locked to keep yourself upright. Determination serves you well when everything else fails you, so you cling to it now.

You're shivering by the time the Doctor's stained shirt and trousers join yours on the heap outside the door. The hot water doesn't stop the shivers, but her hands eventually manage that—a soapy massage beginning at the back of your neck, working up into your hair; her left hand resting at your hip, ready in case she needs to suddenly retake your weight.

It's menial work, washing an invalid. It's beneath her. Hotly, for a few seconds, you hate her for demeaning herself. Then you're too tired to do more than stay on your feet while her hands go everywhere and rub away the oily, burning stains of dead Cyberium. You can't even think of anything inappropriate to say as she handles your balls, but you do look down in the grip of a certain, platonic curiosity. It's a notable vulnerability for many humanoid males, after all. Easy to exploit. Not just your life that's in her hands.

"Not a word out of your mouth," she warns.

"Wouldn't dream of it," you mumble, smiling faintly. She washes your genitals with the same care she took over your scalp, extra-careful to rinse away the suds, and moves on. Her self-restraint—or it might still be her prudish reserve—amuses you.

The liquid soap she uses comes from Earth—olive oil and aromatic essences of citrus with a smoky note that you don't immediately recognise. But you do recognise the combined scent: traces of it lingered in her hair when you first kissed her and on the pillow when you lay beside her. It's a human thing. Out of place in her world, on her body.

"Secret Santa," you hear yourself say. Feel yourself chuckle at half-surfaced memories of a whole other life—that deep-cover persona at M.I.6, all office politics, arbitrary targets and human social rituals. Few of those offer a better opportunity to sow a little discord than the winter festivities: alcohol, intense social stress, and Secret Santa. O was the master of subtle-yet-vindictive anonymous gift-giving.

"What?"

"The soap. From Earth. Was it a Secret Santa?"

You're just talking, dangerously near to babbling from fatigue and pleasant relief at being more comfortable than you were five minutes ago. The random question actually seems to vex the Doctor, though. Bonus! She picks up the fancy plastic bottle and examines it, letting go of you to swipe the hair out of her face.

One of the humans must have given it to her or left it in her TARDIS. The Doctor hasn't the faintest idea which of them, or when, or why. She hasn't given it a moment's thought while using the stuff to clean her own body. You feel her disquiet at your back, her self-recrimination manifesting as restless discomfort in a confined space. She never spares a shred of that for you.

"I bought it," she lies, rather too late. "From a little shop. With money."

You're still smiling when she reaches your ankles and still enjoying a quiet, inner glow when she helps you on with a loose, grey gown before dropping you onto a clean bed.

Little victories—they add up. They're situational. You'll take what you can get.


	4. Chapter 4

You did cry, sometimes, when the Doctor couldn't see you. For a while, a buzzbot shadowed your every move inside the Vault, a constant irritant out of the corner of your eye, denying you privacy on top of everything. He was testing you, the Doctor—good Missy takes her medicine; bad Missy grabs the nasty little buzzy bot out of the air and crushes it in her fist before using it as a clever means of escape.

You didn't sleep much, not for a long time, but you spent hours under the bedclothes where he couldn't watch you. Crying.


	5. Chapter 5

The Doctor fusses around the bed, her attention everywhere but on you. Like you, she's traded the security of her usual outfit for an inmate's gown—grey, Gallifreyan-decent, full-coverage from throat to ankles and buttoned at the wrists and shoulder. They're made almost entirely frictionless from synthetic silk lighter than cobwebs, so as not to add pain or distraction while a Time Lord goes about healing their body or, in the worst case, regenerating with medical assistance. You've done that. The functional grey always reminds you of dying before your time, that first time—panic on the edge of oblivion when you couldn't regenerate on your own. It took four healers to drag the Doctor out of that sickroom, yelling at the top of his lungs—spilling secrets in the terror of losing you, his desperation battering at your fragmenting psychic shield.

Young love.

Now, she barely spares you a glance as she sets up holographic monitoring around your bed. Her face is stony, her mind a cold wall of unyielding silence. Wet hair clings in rattails to her cheeks, the back of her neck, her gingerbread roots darkening the halo of summer-blonde. Half-hidden by the prim collar of the gown is the yellowing bruise you left with your teeth as you dry-humped her against a crystal pillar, trying to pick up the bloody threads of what once bound you together on a higher plane. You loved it at the time—her moan as you marked her, aroused her. Now it mars her, ugly-wrong, and you want to take it back.

That's the trouble. She makes you weak—second-guessing yourself from moment to moment as though, after all this time, her scrutiny still matters. Still shapes you.

You've seen how she wants to sculpt you—the shape you'll become if she ever gets her own way. Your brilliance on a leash, your purpose blunted, and your soul racked with miserable regret. And you've seen beyond all that, now—seen that for all you've been to one another, you don't share so much as a common heritage. Not even that. At least, before, you always had that.

Your head throbs.

Shuffling onto your side, your back to the Doctor and the brightest of the holograms, you draw up your knees, tuck in your elbows. Shut your eyes, swallowing nausea that has little to do with the battery-acid taint in your mouth or the ache in your bones. It's building into something sharper. You can feel it coming—a fizzing discomfort keeping your nervous system on red-alert while your body craves rest. When you try to suppress it, the sensation peaks into a bright, brilliant sting at your extremities, flowing hotly into your spine to jolt your core. Electric pins and poisoned needles.

_Fuck..._

One of the Doctor's medical monitors sounds a brief alarm. You don't make a sound.

"Master?" She offers the word—fragile, uncertain. She only uses your name like that when she has to. Once, you had other names—ones you used in public and the ones you shared only with each other. In all the universe, only you know her name. But do you, though? Is it even her name?

Hand on your shoulder. A gift of concern nudging carefully against your mind. Still familiar. That's what really hurts. When you touch her, she feels the same as always.

"Leave me alone."

"Can't do that. Not yet." She takes her hand away, though. "How bad is it?"

Stupid question, stupid Doctor! You've spent lifetimes inhabiting a decaying shell, an incompatible alien form, a private universe of constant, intractable agony. You had two choices—adapt, or die. She knows which path you took. Is it possible that she's failed to grasp the implications? You're the master of pain. You know it better than you know yourself and trust it as the only universal constant.

You do feel like hell, though.

"Sedate me, then. I'm sick of the sight of you." Even that gives her more than you wanted to give away—tells her that you're currently incapable of voluntarily slipping under the threshold of consciousness to heal yourself. You're weak, just how she likes it.

"Fine," she says, and you don't recognise that tone in her voice. You're too tired to turn and look, to puzzle it out.

The Doctor doesn't allow her TARDIS to manage your treatment. Automated systems, retro-fitted during the Time War from the looks of it, are theoretically capable of sustaining the crew with everything from minor surgery to emergency stasis. Still, you've got previous with this ship. Done a little improvisational surgery of your own and felt it bleed. Made it scream. It remembers. It might tolerate your presence whenever the Doctor does—when you mutually agree the state of uneasy grace that allows you to fuck and sleep and talk together without truth or consequences—but even the Doctor doesn't trust her eccentric TARDIS with drug-synthesis and a direct route into your veins. She injects you with a syringe, old-school—sweet narcotic fire in your blood, making your brain swim, then she presses you into the welcoming darkness with a kiss of the mind.


	6. Chapter 6

The early days in the Vault were wobbly and surreal, focused on the practicalities and the difficulties. It was a space designed to store a corpse in, for starters, but having made sure that you had light and air, the Doctor wasn't yet ready to trust you with anything as lethal as furniture. You tolerated it, perfectly aware that the alternative was actually becoming the resident corpse. You'd have promised anything to survive. You promised to be good; to let the Doctor teach you how.

Claustrophobic inside four walls, alone, you weren't sure you'd been honest. Expedient, yes. Always. Desperate, yes. Glad to see him in your darkest hour? Oh, yes. But did you mean it? You weren't sure you'd been lying.

The Doctor wasn't sure and hadn't decided how to handle the situation. Somehow, you'd pictured it with him standing at your side every step of the way, not coming and going without reference to your sacrifice—you'd tentatively imagined a state of reliance, not dependency.

You did let him disarm you. You could've lied. Instead, huddled in your corner, you listed the technology and other weaponry concealed about and inside your person. Everything. Nearly every stitch you wore was potentially lethal, which seemed hilarious until that exact moment. You left it for the Doctor to articulate the next step—to ask you in so many words to remove your clothing. You wanted to see if he'd say it, choke on it, or chicken out. It was worth it just to watch him squirm.

An exit and an entrance later, he handed you a grey hospital shift, gave you a pained look that might've been meant as an apology, and turned his back.

"I've got nothing you haven't seen before, dear," you pointed out, primly. A frown. "With the possible exception of fissionable knicker-elastic."

"Let's not make this any harder than it needs to be," the Doctor replied softly. At least he remembered how distracting you could be when you put your mind to it. "Take off your clothes, please."

Unbuttoning, shucking, unlacing, stripping, you felt doubly naked—as if the Vault itself had eyes on you. You felt small.

"I did tell you about the subcutaneous—"

"Yes. I brought a thing." Patting his pocket, the Doctor moved further away.

You hated the gown instantly and vehemently. Ankle-length genosilk hanging like a sack from your shoulders, all clinical and ugly. Grey was hardly your colour and it smelled like hospitals. Like dying.

"Done," you announced, kicking at the pile of cloth.

"Are you decent?"

"My beauty shall not blind your eyes."

The Doctor was appalled by the stash of hidden weaponry that he slowly picked out of your discarded outfit. You stood and watched him, adding to the pile one subtly-poisoned hairpin at a time as you let down your hair. You could've stuck one right in his neck—legged it while he was flopping like a landed fish and then regenerating. You didn't.

"Does no-one search prisoners these days?" he demanded, brandishing a sharpened length of metal pulled from your corset and the bootlace that you once used to strangle/decapitate the Crown Prince of Somewhere Very Boring. "What happened to health-and-safety-at-work?"

You cocked your head to look askance at him. Not as effective with your hair loose as when it was piled up on top of your head. You wondered if it was long enough to be used as a garotte.

"I _am_ your prisoner, then?"

"I meant—"

"I know what you meant. It's not as if a Dalek could manage to frisk me. Those other fellows removed my options, so they didn't need to look at my arsenal—they simply assumed that I was armed and dangerous and treated me accordingly. Quite right. Frankly, my dear, I could rip out your jugular with my teeth, crush your trachea with a single blow, or suffocate you using only my naughty bits if I decide you deserve to die happy—so what difference does this make?"

A moral one, of course. Always, with the Doctor, a moral one.

"Missy—"

The Doctor's visible discomfort was the only fun you'd had since Skaro.

"If you wanted my clothes off, you only had to ask." You slid your palms down your torso, pressing the microfabric against breasts, belly, and hips. "Do I kneel down and service you now, 'officer', or do you surprise me up the back way when I'm bending for the soap?"

You winked—a suggestive, exaggerated leer. The Doctor looked about to part company with his lunch.

"This can work. Missy, please. Give it a chance."

You'd have listened if he hadn't stopped to scan you head to toe with his stupid screwdriver before he fled.

"Don't you trust me?" The question wavered with vulnerability—something drawn from within you that you couldn't recognise. Something real and unwanted that would hurt you so, so much if you let it decide your fate.

The Doctor didn't meet your gaze. "Not today."

"I'm not wearing this," you screamed at his retreating back. "I signed up for a thousand years of penance and tedious moral instruction, not a personal stylist with a god-complex!"

Seconds after leaving the Vault carrying the clothes from your back, the Doctor returned with two new outfits all wrapped up in fancy travel-boxes and pretty tissue paper. The tailoring was the best that Earth currency could buy. The smog and temporal energy of Victorian London lingered on him, but you could sense that he'd only made short hops: one to order the stuff then a few days forward to collect it. Then back to you, almost before he left. Almost frantic. His urgency to reassure you had momentum, if not meaning.

You were mollified. The Doctor's conscience was appeased. You both nearly smiled.


	7. Chapter 7

You're still alive. To be honest, that seems to be the default setting. You've tried the other thing, and it doesn't stick.

"No." Your voice is a parched croak. "No, no, no." It's a multi-faceted protest, succinctly covering both the general and the specific. While you can only manage the one word, you'll make it work for a living. You'll break its bloody back. "No."

"I'm here," the Doctor reminds you, leaning over you. Her relative position and height let you determine that you're lying on your back. The reason everything's fuzzy is the low-grade energy barrier creating an oxygen bubble around your head and shoulders. The Doctor reaches through the forcefield, green energy discharge circling her arm as she waves her stupid screwdriver in front of your nose.

You need a much better word for this development.

"Fuck."

"Your brains didn't dissolve in the goo," she announces, brightly. "That's a win."

Doesn't feel like one. You can identify a full set of body parts but commanding them is sluggish and uncomfortable—like a new body after a bad regeneration, just after the pain goes down a notch from 'meaningless' to 'indescribable'. Just as you get used to that, sudden electric-shock agony jolts you to the bone and forces out another curse between your clenched teeth. Until it subsides, the world contains nothing else—just that pain and the struggle to breathe past it, your rigid body quaking so violently that the bed creaks. There's a crackle of silver-blue energy emanating from your body and grounding into the TARDIS. The Doctor stands well back.

"Did I regenerate?" You lift your hands, frantic to see evidence of your own existence, but your skin is concealed by soft, grey gloves that fasten to the cuffs of your gown. They're spotted with mostly-dry stains, your hands still sweating Cyberium.

"No," soothes the Doctor, finally paying you some proper attention. Catching your hands before you can peel off the gloves, she leans right inside the oxygen bubble, so you're face to face—nose to nose. You wonder if she's about to kiss you. "Still you. It was touch and go, though. Can't risk putting you under again. Oxygen helps." She grimaces, withdrawing her head from the bubble, leaving her blurred again. "I didn't think it'd be this bad."

That's not an apology. It never is. It's guilt, though—that emotion that she never decides how to process or learns how to properly experience. She just lets it hurt her. She'll beat her own breast and wallow in it without ever saying 'sorry'.

"Prognosis, _Doctor?_ "

"Too-stupid-to-live but doing it anyway." Despite her waspish tone, you settle a bit. It sounds about right. "Those shocks are happening a couple of times an hour. Keeps stopping your hearts. Next time you think about splicing yourself with an infinite power source designed to inhabit a walking corpse inside a metal suit, you should probably remember this. How much _do_ you remember?"

"What?" For a second, addled and angry, you think she's talking about your claustrophobic dreams. About the Vault.

The Doctor softens again. Any suffering creature. Even you. You dread to think what she's just seen on your face.

"The Cyberium. About its power source. I need to know everything."

"... Oh."


	8. Chapter 8

"You smell like the Earth. Are we on Earth?" As much as you tried to focus inward, to commit to self-modification, the reality beyond the Quantum Fold doors still tempted you. When the Doctor came in one day smelling like the Twentieth Century, sense-memory almost overwhelmed you with the longing for it all. Not that you showed it. By then, you'd cultivated a stiff-backed dignity about your loss of agency—a mask over your mask, inside a Vault, inside a TARDIS. A Missy made of hard-lacquered nesting dolls, huddling inside herself. Smaller and smaller.

"I've found a place there," admitted the Doctor, shifty. "To wait."

"For a thousand years?"

"Give or take."

You'd lost track of how long it'd already been, your time-sense fracturing in the early days of destructive despair. Seeing how you tormented yourself at first, counting and recounting the moments of your captivity, he'd never actually say. You had to measure the passage of time by the microscopic creep of the laughter lines around his silly eyes.

"Oh? Where?" Surely he'd give you that much? It hardly mattered where. You'd raze it to the ground, regardless, if you stepped outside those doors. You could taste the smoke—hear the screaming. "Some nether-void of Hell itself, no doubt. The arse-end of everything."

"Bristol." The Doctor beamed.

Bristol. You nodded and poured the tea.

"We need to have one of our special little chats, don't we?" you said, thoughtfully. "You're ever so bored, dear, if you're this happy about Bristol."


	9. Chapter 9

Shivering, you curl up on your side and stare into infinity. There's almost a mathematical pattern to the electrical discharges—just not quite, so you can't predict the next attack. Not to the minute. Just close enough that you can start to dread it when it creeps towards statistical probability or, worse, convince yourself that it's been long enough this time that the pain might— _might_ —not come at all. Then it does, and each time is slightly worse than the time before.

You're becoming destructive to the environment—a humanoid electrical storm zapping the life out of the Doctor's diagnostic equipment, and the machine she's had regulating your heartsbeat. That's why she hasn't let you sleep again: in case that failed, and you needed to take control of your own autonomic functions. Now you do. Certainly, you can do that when necessary, when you're _not_ convulsing from a lightning strike. Bit of a design-flaw, really.

"Whoops," you say tonelessly, taking in as much of the fallout as you can see without moving. There's smoke, charred circuitry, dead screens. The Doctor empties a small fire-extinguisher into the guts of a generator and drops it to the floor.

She looks scared and it's not because you're blowing up bits of her ship around her.

"We lost the oxygen tent that time, and the pacemaker," she explains, redundantly. Nervous-talking and nervous-hands, trying to be busy when there's nothing left for her to do. She looms over you, breathing hard. "I don't dare put compressed oxygen anywhere near you. One spark..."

You laugh softly at the thought of self-igniting. Hardly a blaze of glory, but satisfyingly messy. Might be the best option. Quick, at least. You're basically electrocuting yourself to death—your own private, self-generated lightning storm. The Cyberium regulated the power with core programming designed to animate a corpse or control a walking suit of armour using tiny electrical impulses—to sustain its form at the heart of the network and enable vast computational power. Forever. You can't control it and your body's attempts to fight it, purge it, appear to be killing you. Time Lord physiology is hard-wired for permanence—redundancy and regeneration—but there are limits. Shorting out your synapses for good would do it. Stopping your hearts for good would do it. Carbon-based life is electrical, in the end, and just one major power-cut or power-surge away from quitting the mortal coil.

"Drop me off somewhere," you decide, grabbing the edge of the bed and pulling. Half-upright, half-falling, you get your feet to the floor.

"What? Stop it!" The Doctor grabs you before you fall, arms tightly around your chest so it gets even harder to breathe. You both slump against the bed as you try to dislodge her with your elbows and, when that fails, with fingernails dug hard into her soft skin.

"This isn't how I intend to kill you," you growl in her ear. "I've got a list, quite a big list, and this isn't on it. Leave me somewhere." Light the blue touch-paper and retire to a safe distance. She probably doesn't need to go very far away to be safe. You might level a building. Maybe a city block if your regeneration kicks in before you die. She could probably stay to watch, if she wants.

"You're not gonna die!" Grunting with the effort, she tries to get you back on the bed. "Not of this. Stupidity, maybe." With no leverage on your dead weight, the Doctor's losing the fight. Her hands slip on your gown, yours on hers, until you're on your knees and she has to come down too if she won't let go. "Listen to me," she insists, shifting her hold to your shoulders as she settles on her knees. "Your body is purging this—I've seen the readings." She nods, upwards and to your left, at the smoking remains of a holographic generator. You stare obligingly at the absence of evidence to support her claim. "You just have to hold on. You _have_ to stay in control and keep your body functioning."

"Don't be shrill, dear."

"Don't be _dead._ "

She's so frightened—you feel it through her touch, her nearness. It must be days now since you fucked, doing it right up against the tantalising cliff-edge of mating your minds for life. Something still lingers, some chemical and psychic process leaving you open to one another. Her terror feels like scampering footsteps across your hearts, like something almost fleeing from you; it smells like gunpowder and electric rainstorms. Yummy.

"Why d'you even care?" It's inarguable that she does. You can doubt it during the centuries without her, but when push comes to shove, when she's right here, your cynicism dissolves in her squirming, stony sincerity. You can see it in her eyes.

You like her eyes, this time. They're unfathomable, a colour you can't quite name without doing her a gross injustice.

The Doctor wriggles on the hook of your question, fingers digging into your shoulders, then blurts, "Because I do!"

"I'll probably regenerate."

"I wouldn't bank on it. You wouldn't have come here if you were ready to roll those dice."

Wouldn't you? That's news to you. Probably she sees things more clearly from way up there on Mount Doctor, though.

"You're really hot when you're angry with me."

"I'm always angry with you."

"Yeah." You tip forward to let your forehead rest against hers. She doesn't recoil, so you close your eyes, content with something that isn't a lie between you. "You're saving me, then?"

"I don't need to. You just have to hang on a bit longer."

Your hands are on her thighs, bracing your weight. You tighten your grip until your fingers dig in and you're shaking with the muscular effort.

"Tell me your name before I die."

"You know my name." Brow-to-brow with her, you feel the contraction of her bewildered frown.

"All of them?"

"Yes," she says, firmly. "And you're _not_ dying!" Only someone who isn't sure can sound that definite. "Now, concentrate. It'll get harder before it gets easier, but you can _do_ this."

You both look down at the first crackle of silver-blue across the backs of your hands. It itches like static inside the gloves, making your hairs stand on end, but the pain is coming not far behind it. She's made you lose count of the seconds.

"Are you patronising me?" She sets you upright, propping your shoulders with both hands. You miss the coolness of her skin, her breath on your face. For a second there, you were safe.

You grimace, nauseated as nightmare intersects with the now—a palimpsest existence, this hospital and the Vault colliding in a horrible, mangled mental mashup. You and Missy can't coexist in the same space. Her will and yours. Her self-imposed vulnerability and your externalised rage. Her surrender to the Doctor and... and _this_. You _won't_ be who you were. You won't erase yourself and get rewritten.

"I'm looking after you," says the Doctor, gently.

Pushing blindly with both hands, you knock her sprawling on her back.

"Tried that," you spit, struggling not to topple after her. Not to try killing her with your bare hands during the moments you have left. You get a hand around a strut beneath the bed, swaying. "Didn't take."

"Are you sure?"

"Really sure. The _price_ I paid while you wallowed in your precious humanity, shacked up all cosy on Earth..." You choke on your past, on the poison you've distilled from Missy's lonely torment, before you can finish articulating the thought. Disgusted, you wave the Doctor away with a sweep of your arm. "Ugh."

She's silent for so long—minutes ticking by until the next electrical discharge tries stopping your hearts. Eyes shut to keep her out of your world, you start counting, trying to overwrite primal dread with visceral resentment and terror with knowledge. It doesn't work.

"What should I have done?" The Doctor sounds far away, now. Or very close but very small.

Really? She's asking that _now?_

"Stood with me." Your voice feels small, too. Your body remembers the Vault—that corner, pulled in on yourself and frail, begging the Doctor with everything but words to show you the way out. "Helped me."

Her breath catches in her throat, close by—the first hiccoughing inhale of a sob. Then silence. Victory clenches your fist, spilling a hit of raw pleasure-reward into your already frothing biochemistry. This is how you survive the Doctor—one aching, hollow win at a time. Momentary satisfaction in that dizzying rush, then back to the endless craving.

Doubling over your knees, still hanging onto the bed frame, you breathe through the first major skirmish of the next attack. It blinds you—leaves dancing dark-and-starlight spots in front of your eyes. Consciousness starts slipping from your grasp.

"Get back," you manage to warn, not sure where the Doctor is but maddeningly sure that you don't want to accidentally fry her alive.

She's hung back through every lightning-show so far, but this time she throws herself at you. Arms around your neck, thoughts plunging into your thoughts, she curls around you and holds you tight.

"No," you gasp, when you sluggishly catch on. "Don't, don't, Doctor don't..." Your brief attempt at a struggle doesn't even loosen her grip.

"Now," she gasps in your ear as your nervous system overloads. She's already quaking from the pain, but her mind is a fortress with you safe inside. _Hold on._


	10. Chapter 10

Caged within your cage, one nesting-doll prison inside the other, you skirted the outer limits of the forcefield at speed, close to shattering under the strain of compliance. You hated it—the Vault, the recycled air, the illusion of daylight, and now the containment field stifling your most basic telepathic perceptions. The Doctor might as well have hacked your limbs off, nailed you to the floor, smothered you with his dry palm over your mouth and nose as ask you to stand inside there again.

You made dizzying clockwise circuits of your newly-restricted perimeter, allowing the deadly forcefield to catch at your skirts, burning the elbows out of your blouse. If you threw yourself right into the barrier... well, there'd be no regeneration. That was the whole point of this place; to stop your corpse getting any bright ideas. Tempting—the look on the Doctor's face as he watched you fry might've made it all mean something. And then it would all be over.

But there was his voice.

"Missy, stop."

You stopped and faced him, panting, dishevelled and dizzy from going in circles. It was the first time you'd stopped moving since he brought the Vault to Earth. You might've teased him about Bristol, but it's what broke you. Knowing what was just beyond that door—not the safety-net of the Doctor's TARDIS, now, but a city within a country on a planet full of _billions_ of barely-sentient lifeforms. They were all targets and you could almost _taste_ the opportunity.

Until that moment, until Bristol, you'd actually wondered if you'd begun to change. Not a massive pendulum-swing on his arbitrary moral scale, god forbid, but an obliging lateral creep in the general direction of the Doctor's way of thinking; an inkling that the squashy almost-people might as well be left alive because they were smelly the other way, and could be induced to make the tea if they were allowed to go on breathing.

But no. Marching up and down the Vault with your fists and teeth clenched, you were ready to claw down that door and murder the first human you set eyes on. And you could've done both. The Doctor knew that, though you guessed he slept better at night if he didn't think about you escaping. Perhaps he'd given up sleep completely to stand vigil over your redemption—stationed himself just outside the door like a knight kneeling with his sword, trusting to fervour and prayer against overwhelming odds. Your money would always be on the blade.

The Doctor knew that too, of course. That's why he asked you to stand on the death-dais, raising the containment field around you before he opened the Vault. It was the first time since the very early days that he'd done it; asked you to occupy your actual tomb.

You couldn't breathe in there, panic and fury driving you to move, move, move, so you didn't have to _think_.

He came up to the barrier and lifted a hand in wary greeting, offering it up closer and closer until the energy frazzled the layer of dead skin cells from his palm in a show of miniature fireworks. There was a scar across the fingerprint of his middle-right digit, old and faded to white. That stopped you—caught your attention and held it. You'd never noticed the mark before, didn't know how he came by it. How could he have secrets from you while you were _dying_ for him? You thrust both your palms into the energy barrier, pushing against the repelling force, grounding yourself in the building agony of the burn—something real to anchor you before you flew apart inside your tiny, tiny box. The Doctor flinched, snatching his own hand away.

"Missy!"

"When and where," you demanded, raw, ragged, panting hard as you mastered the pain. "How long have I been here?! Give me _Time!_ "

He yielded without a fight. Later, you understood that his fear was for your immediate safety, not of your undying outrage. He spoke quickly, urgently, looking poised to cut and run.

"Two-thousand-and-twenty-seven days, Earth solar. It's the twenty-fourth of February, Nineteen-Forty-Six. Five minutes past midnight. Bristol, St Luke's University. Underground. They've had a war, this was a shelter." Like a current of fresh air creeping in through hidden cracks in the tomb, you breathed to the bottom of your lungs again—a Time Lord again. Context. Time—your birthright. Sweet relief in a giddying rush to the head making you sway on your feet. "Missy." His jailer-voice, hushed and guilty and a little bit sickly. "Please, stop now."

Surprised, oblivious to his meaning, you followed his gaze and focused on your hands—your burning, blistering hands in their halo of blue plasma fire. You shrieked, stumbling backwards before crumpling to your knees and dry-heaving at the smell of burning meat rising from your own screaming flesh. You'd never minded it before—that smell, that thick, delicious death-smoke that you'd left across half the cosmos. Now it filled the containment chamber. Your first real taste of empathy climbed like snakes up your nose and into your mouth until you were trying to gag and scream at the same time and choking on both.

"Nardole, let me in there _now!_ "

Falling on his own knees, the Doctor cradled your injured hands and grasped your shoulder, whispering in Gallifreyan as the barrier rebuilt itself around you both, enclosing that stench and the sound of your dry sobs.

"Kill me," you pleaded, doubled over his knees and rocking your body, starving for air around the scream building in your chest. "Kill me killmekillmekillme..."

"Not today." He stroked your hair, clumsy as a child. He held you. It was the first time in those bodies, and it was hopeless; the two of you in a long-limbed tangle like a pair of stringless puppets dropped from a great height—spiky elbows, jutting knees and awkward ankle-bones all getting in the way of your theoretical yin-yang match. You didn't fit together at any point, but the Doctor put his arms around you and didn't let go.

"Nardole," he told the intercom, breathing hard. "Lock it right up, disable the containment field, and walk away."

"For how long, sir?" That was the other one, the waddly conscience-one who'd tagged along from your execution, sounding all anxious and judgey.

The Doctor's arms tightened around you. Always so sure of himself in battle, with someone to protect.

"I don't care," he grated out. "Be somewhere that isn't here for a very long time. Now!" Shouting the last word, he sagged against you—his cheek against your hair. A whisper that the hired-help probably couldn't make out: "This is private."

Privacy. You laughed at the notion, face buried in the Doctor's lapels. Scrutiny had turned you inside out for two-thousand-and-twenty-seven days, but when it came _his_ turn to have an emotion inside the goldfish-bowl of your penitential world, everyone had to avert their gaze.

"Time out?" he requested, still whispering into your hair. "Just you and me, like always?" You nodded, the burden of old obligation drawing you back from the brink to rest in his uncertain embrace. When did he last request it—the nearest thing to a functioning friendship that you've achieved in centuries? 'Interdict', he called it once, breathlessly and pompously justifying while you did something carnally gratifying to each other up against a wall. Weapons down, white flags raised. Something approximating a truce, just between the two of you, and yes, always private. So private. You blinked mascara tears and wiped your face maliciously on his pristine white shirt. "Missy. _Master_." A hesitation and a breath. For a fraction of a second, you thought he was going to use another name—one you hadn't heard spoken in millennia. "Hold on. I've got you."


	11. Chapter 11

You and the Doctor face each other beneath a lightning-torn sky. You're abstracted placeholders in a psychic landscape—a desolate moor at twilight, prematurely dark beneath heavy blue-black thunderclouds.

"Earth?" You spread your arms. In here, you both wear your chosen costumes—the Doctor's haphazard long coat, blue cropped trousers and fanciful rainbows; your dapper wool and silk, carefully selected and intricately layered, like any good disguise. In here there's no pain; that's all crashing in the sky above, safely remote. For now. "Even inside your own head, still Earth?"

"You'd prefer Gallifrey?" She's icy. Still. A fortress. "I expect I could do a really good impression of the Matrix eating us alive—how about that?"

You lower your eyes. Missy learned shame. You can still taste it from your nightmare—blood-iron and cloying meat-smoke, tainted with the memory of panic and mascara-tears.

"You should've let me die."

"Yes. I should."

"No. The execution, I mean, you should—"

"Yes."

Pitiless, the Doctor ignores you to look around her, turning in a slow circle. The mindscape is bleak, fuzzy at the edges; there's chaos in the sky but no wind at ground level. No sounds of wildlife or smells of civilisation. She's pouring in no more energy than she must to sustain the illusion. A gravel-dirt track beneath your feet fails to sound real as she moves her boots, though it leaves dusty marks on the leather. Abruptly, she points.

"Shelter. Come on."

There's a stone building hogging the horizon to your right, a short wade through thigh-deep vegetation. It's scratched her shins bloody before she makes it to the crest of the rise. Real enough to hurt, then.

It's... what, an ancient church? Rectangular dry-stone walls with a crude wooden roof. Outbuildings and the remains of a square tower, all long-ruined, butt up against the central frame. A rotten oak door moves slowly when the Doctor leans her shoulder into it.

"This won't survive one strike," you point out, pointing upwards at the threatening sky.

"It might." She slips inside. Anger drags you hot on her heels, into the dark.

"It _won't_. I could have it down with a huff and a puff!"

"Sink the lifeboat just to prove you can. Yeah, that sounds like you." The Doctor pulls out her sonic screwdriver and waves the inadequate light around. Boxes, barrels, lumpy shapes covered in old canvas. "Come on. Resources." She drags aside the nearest canvas and unearths a squat chest of drawers.

"Don't you know?"

"Mm?"

"You created this construct, you should know everything about it!"

"There's a lot I should know. Plenty I don't. Even in my own head. I've probably stacked the deck in our favour, though. That sounds like me." Beaming, she unearths a box of candles and a tinderbox from the topmost drawer. "Let there be light!" She hands you the tinderbox. "Make a fire. You're good at burning stuff."

It isn't even contempt—that look on her face, thrown into uncanny shadow by the yellow glow of her sonic. More like she's daring you to reject her lifeline. Lifeboat. Whatever. The cosmos wouldn't weep for you; it wouldn't even care enough to throw a great big party over your demise. Only one person cares either way, and she's thrown in her lot with you. Why?

For a second, as lightning sheets across the sky, you're back there on your knees in the infirmary, the Doctor's arms locking around your neck. You're back on your knees in the Vault, the Doctor nursing your burnt hands and whispering comfort.

Staggering, you clutch the wall.

"Doctor—"

"Hurry up with that fire. It's gonna get nippy by nightfall."

"You should've let me do this." Shaking your head to clear it, you indicate the dank room, the tiny, glassless window-holes, and the half-made landscape beyond. You tap your temple, irritably. "This is _my_ thing. I'd make it comfortable at least."

"A fire'll do that. Focus on staying alive, the basics, that's why we're here. Besides, I saw that just now. You're in no fit state. I thought you'd buried Missy under the carpet?"

God, she's grown so hard. She's not wrong—that's the whole point of this, to focus on survival—but there isn't even a chair, a blanket. You'd have prepared, planned.

"You have _no_ imagination."

"Course I do." She straightens, deigning to give you her full attention at last. "I'm just careful who I share it with."

You're quick to anger in this regeneration, always a breath away from blowing up in anyone's face—blowing them away for being the spark to the powderkeg as much as because you enjoy killing. Reflex. You take it out on some of the decaying clutter, kicking a lectern into twigs for firewood. It's momentarily satisfying, leaving you out of breath and hunched like a street-fighter, fists flexing.

"How come every time you regenerate you act more like a stroppy toddler than you did before?"

"Said the woman dressed for her first day at kindergarten." Concentrating on the tinderbox, you strike a spark on your third go and blow on the handful of horsehair until it catches. "Do you sleep in little rainbow footie-pyjamas?"

"In what I'm wearing when I fall down, usually."

The Doctor throws you a slim, footlong candle. You catch it effortlessly in your right hand, the nest of embers glowing in your left. Let there be light. She could've done it with her sonic, of course. This is a distraction, forcing you to engage with the reality of her spartan mental construct. You take the candle and search the outskirts of the room by its light. Plenty to burn. Not much else.

There's no hearth or chimney, but it's not as if the place lacks ventilation. You unearth a metal bucket marked 'fire', empty out the greyish sand, and build a cone of broken wood inside it.

Lighting a candle from yours, the Doctor uncovers more forgotten furniture. A bookcase, its contents swollen and warped with water damage. A single carved oak pew, collapsed at a 45-degree slope. A stone altar, a smashed font.

"Why a church?" You can't help being curious. Even before you knew the truth about her, the Doctor was a question that you itched to answer. "Delusions of divinity, dear?"

She does you the courtesy of stopping to think about that one before answering.

"Neutral ground," she decides. "And nothing like home to distract us at the wrong moment."

Lie. She wants a miracle. She'll stoop low enough to bargain with the cosmos in abject humility if that's what it takes. On the off chance that she's succeeded in invoking some benevolent deity, they're not yet impressed. The storm is moving overhead, the lightning beginning to fork into the bracken outside.

You're drawn to watch it once the fire's lit. You lean in the doorway. Thunder sounds like a recording on a loop, not always in step with the lightning, but the Doctor's consciousness puts its back into the lightning itself. When it strikes the moor, the shockwave rocks this pathetic shelter.

"That's us," you murmur. You're not speaking to her, really, but the Doctor joins you, peering around the half-stuck door. "Frying and dying together."

"You don't feel any pain in here?"

"What is that—concern?"

"Yes."

"So, how does this go? Huddling by the fire 'til we run out of fuel, or one of those strikes blows us to kingdom come?"

"Pretty much. And this." She holds up a wooden box, some kind of shipping container with a second box inside it. You lift it out, flip the latch. "So we don't forget what really matters."

A metronome.

"God, your brain just plods, doesn't it? A fireside, a steady tick, and everything'll be all right? What the hell is it that you have faith in, Doctor?" To spite her, you'd hurl the box against the wall and shatter the mechanism. But there's a shadow behind her eyes when she hears the question. It intrigues you.

The Doctor takes back the metronome and sets it going. She puts it on the stone altar.

"Hope."

"Prayer," you spit.

"And us, I s'pose."

"Ha! You? Believe in _me?_ Don't make me laugh."

"I said 'us'," the Doctor points out, quietly, and sits cross-legged beside the pitiful fire. She holds out her hands towards the bucket and the uneven flames. "We always end up happening somewhere, don't we? It'd be stupid not to believe that. We're like the Cybermen and the Daleks, only worse because we know it's wrong to drag everything down with us."

"Speak for yourself."

"You know it's wrong. I saw that."

"You _wish_."

"I did, though. You were brilliant."

"Whatever you think you saw in Missy, it's not in me. I killed it, _her_ , because it disgusts me, you _disgust_ me. Never forget it."

The Doctor nods, unmoved by your rage.

"You know it could've been you?"

"What?"

"It could just as easily have been you, not me. That foundling child. That secret life you found in the Matrix. Imagine if it'd been you."

You squat opposite her, glaring across the flames.

"How are you so calm about this? I know—I _know_ I smashed you to tiny pieces. I did. The Matrix did. Gallifrey did!"

The Doctor shrugs. Weariness rather than indifference, you suspect.

"Time," she says, quietly. It isn't a lie. "And because I have to be, or the anger would start me thinking it was all right to lash out, that I'm owed the right. Then I'd really become you, wouldn't I? No, thanks." She takes a fractured strip of wood and pokes it into the heart of the fire. "If I have to be as miserable as you are, I'll do it as me. Whoever that is."

You have to swallow before you can answer her. The emotions tangling in your throat are complicated, constantly shifting and hard to recognise. Nothing like the nightmares of the Vault—nothing you can reject as an aberration belonging to Missy. This, this tangle and struggle for breath mixed with the familiar burn of your rage, is all your own.

You rub the bridge of your nose, joining the Doctor in sitting with crossed legs.

"Possibly your least inspirational lecture ever, that. You're slipping."

"Just honest. We could die here, one or both of us. I wanted you to know what you'd achieved. A million questions about myself and nowhere left that I can look for answers. That's what. Congratulations." There's no sarcasm laced through the final word. It's her exhaustion, her sadness. Something like defeat, but not one you've inflicted. Is this how she makes peace with it all—with herself? By surrendering?

The Doctor gathers a handy heap of firewood near her and lies down, pillowing her head on her folded arm and drawing her knees up towards the fire.

"Storm's here," she says in that same, dead voice. A bolt of lightning grounds just outside the door, rattling what remains on the rusty hinges. The Doctor doesn't even blink. "Are we doing this together or what?"


	12. Chapter 12

"This wasn't what we agreed." The Doctor couldn't look at you. He patched you up, checked you over, made you wear unflattering grey gloves over the nanogene matrix. He couldn't look you in the eye. "Missy. You're halfway out of the dark. Don't look back."

"I don't know what you mean." Still shaken, you were settled by his nearness, but you felt like glass, hardened and dangerously ephemeral at the same time. You were breaking, and he wouldn't stay forever.

"When did you last sleep?"

"When did we get to Bristol?" It wasn't just fatigue numbing your mind and turning your body to jelly. Too many kinds of self-realisation colliding inside a brittle vessel—opening cracks in your exterior. He wanted you to let the light in, but optimism blinded him. The darkness seeped out, instead. "Just before then. Yes. I've been walking." Your words slurred.

"I know. Does it help?"

"Help?" Maybe the forcefield fried your brain as well as your hands. You felt fuzzy, unsure of your reality.

"Four days and third-degree burns," he says. "You need to rest."

Sunlight—you wanted that. Not the moody, fake-dappled dancing dust-motes at the pretend windows, but the open sky. Not even freedom—you'd agreed to surrender that—but space. Air. The taste of even the remotest possibility that you'd survive this process.

"The containment field," you blurted, while the Doctor hoisted you to your feet and got your right arm across his shoulders. "The telepathic damper. Please, don't do that. I don't like that. It's like being buried alive." You spoke as one fully qualified to make the comparison. So many bodies, so much of your life spent in near-death-decay.

"I'll set that up outside," offered the Doctor, steering you towards the bed. "But I won't open that door without one between you and the Earth."

"Right." Compromise. Good. The way ordinary people lived, yes? You swayed, ankles turning as if you'd forgotten how to wear heels. He caught you and righted you. "Yes. Thank you." Gloved hand to your brow, you pushed wisps of hair out of your eyes. "I feel like I drank France. And then Argentina."

"You're in shock."

"That sounds wimpy of me."

"You're magnificent, and in shock," the Doctor corrected himself, gallantly. "There you go." He lowered you onto your bed. You demanded a girly one with frilly bits then made him tell you about the shopping trip. There's pink. And lace. Feather pillows and a featherbed slowing your freefall.

"This is usually the bit where we put someone's appendage in someone's orifice," you remembered, frowning. "Why'd we usually do that, again?"

"Beats me," he chuckled. His pleasure—his being pleased with your company—flowed over you like a balm.

"Oh, but you did 'married', didn't you?" You threw your arm across your eyes, claiming the darkness. "That must've had orificies and things. I think I have those. You can check if you like."

"Night night, Missy."

"You're not leaving?" You tried to sit up, stirred by an echo of panic, but there was a dead weight on your chest, pushing you into the mattress. Oblivion beckoned, seductive.

"No, I'm stealing your other pillow."

When you woke, mostly healed and all hurting, you found the Doctor asleep on the floor, his face framed by frilly white Broderie Anglaise and blue ribbons. It did nothing to soften him: stillness made him look ancient and twice as implacable.

You stuck the toe of your boot into his chest.

"Oi!" You reached for yourself. Missy, the Master—raucous, indefatigable, and really cross. The Doctor jerked awake and stared at the boot poised in front of his nose. You could've crushed his skull, right there and then. All squish-red over the white cotton. Instead, you poked him in the ribs with your pointy toe and began day two-thousand-and-twenty-eight as you meant to go on. Deep breath. Ow. "Friends don't let friends fall asleep wearing a _corset_ , ya clueless bastard."


	13. Chapter 13

Lie down with her in the pre-technological filth and wait to die? No. No! Grabbing the Doctor's arm, you drag her back to her feet—grab the other arm as well and shake her, hard.

"I'm not _doing_ this," you snarl in her face, and push your will against the walls of her psychic construct. It should shatter, control defaulting to the strongest mind present, but the illusion doesn't even waver. "Don't think I can't kill you in here. I can. I will!"

_Sink the lifeboat just to prove you can. Yeah, that sounds like you._

The Doctor looks annoyed rather than distressed by the rough handling. You'd thought her tired, weakened, but nothing here yields to your force—not even the expression on her face. She looks like she could wait forever for your rage to touch bottom. Without hostages, you have no leverage to move her.

Choking with fury, you push her away, kick the fire bucket over, and turn your back as she rights herself from the stumble. The steady tick of the metronome echoes like thunder inside your skull. The more you try to ignore its message, the louder and more demanding it gets. _Live, live, live, live..._

"Another prison, then." You shudder, the Vault too fresh in your memory. It was a lifetime ago but feels exactly like now—like you're pacing your jail cell, brittle and breaking. For her. For the _Doctor!_ If there was a penance to be done for breaking your promise to remain in the Vault, you lived it on Earth—seventy-seven years of waiting and hating, constrained from every direction and even by yourself. No more prisons. Never again. "Let me out." You clap your palms over your ears. The hollow tick-tick resonates on the inside of your skull, growing louder until you scream, _"Let me out!"_

"Master." Finally moved, the Doctor reaches into your devolving chaos, your whole-body scream, and cups your face between her palms. Tears in her eyes. Did you do that—are they for you? "Master," she says again, not so steady as before. Her fingers spread out to find the pressure-points across your cheeks and at your temples, tickling behind your ears. You want to twist free, but she's chained you with her gaze—all that bleeding-heart compassion underlying that timeless _look_ that she keeps only for you. Only ever you. You do _know_ that, when she holds you still for a moment. You do _know_ that it's only ever been you. It's a sad look—sadder since Gallifrey, burdened by the billions you destroyed for her sake. It's honest, searing you with brutal and absolute truth. The oldest truth between you, more or less unspoken. It's yours—her pain, gift-wrapped and proffered where there's no space left for trust, no possibility of safety. Her eyes fill with tears, but she doesn't let them fall. A head-tilt, just a fraction to the left, adding wryness to her whisper and freeing a lock of summertime hair to fall across her cheek. "Master." She tries to smile, but her smile is a broken thing because of you. That's her surrender, her submission.

You avert your gaze for a moment, overcome—just a flicker of the eyes to save yourself from falling. Then you see it: the Doctor's still wearing the bruise at her throat, the one you gave her as you tried to devour everything she was willing to give before she could abandon you again. (Yet again). It should've stayed behind in the real world along with the fugly hospital gowns and the dying bodies, but she brought it with her.

"I..." You're seldom lost for words, but her honesty leaves you crazed with wanting. Old anger cuts like a hot wire in your chest, burning more urgently the longer you stare at the Doctor without wishing her dead. There's a litany of paranoia, picking open old wounds to keep the pain fresh—keep you from doing what Missy did to survive herself. What you... Missy... she... you...

Lightning strikes the roof, showering you both in splinters of woodworm-rot. You cringe until you're sure the roof won't fall. The Doctor doesn't let go of your face. She doesn't move a muscle.

She glances down at your hands, clenched and pulled tight against your diaphragm—your instinctive reaction telling her that you want to live. Back up at your face, deep into your eyes. She lets go—every barrier, every layer of defence. You could dive into the bottomless pool of her and destroy her from the inside. All at once, or slowly across lifetimes. Your choice: leave, stay, die, live. Shape this lifeboat around you, or stare into the Doctor's eyes and let it sink. Kill you both.

So tempting. For days at a time—longer, sometimes—you ache for death, imagining the absence of self. It's not peace you expect to find beyond the dark boundary—just _nothing_ , the negation of existence. The dark nights you've spent flirting with notions of death until your desire for it becomes the breathless kind; until it leaves you sweaty and dry-mouthed from denying yourself the release. One last push, one quick thrust into oblivion and... Ahhhhhhh.

Pupils dilating, the Doctor becomes disconcerted. She's caught the backwash of your physical response without sharing the thoughts that provoked it; she doesn't understand, but she doesn't like how it feels. She can't release you without surrendering control of your heartbeats, your breathing. You could make her job very difficult without much effort at all.

"Don't mind me." You hold her face between your palms for a moment, feeling the hot blush in her cheeks that you can't see in the candlelight. She responds if you speak softly to her—you've learned that. Yell and rage all you want, and she'll just stand there; punch, kick and bite till you fall in the dust at her feet, spent, and she won't budge an inch. Softness gets right past her guard and right to the hearts; she misreads it as filler for whatever need currently drives her. That's how you did it—Agent O, across her lifetimes, reflecting her kindly back at herself, too passive to register as a threat. You weren't sure that'd work to her face, not for more than a few minutes, but it did. So very well. You saw so many sides of her while she wasn't paying attention. "My relationship with death is... complex. Close, you might say." You smile, watching your fingertips carefully match the pressure-points she's touching on your own skull. "But I know how a threesome would make you blush, love." The Doctor's lips part involuntarily, just as you get the hold right and balance her out—not fighting her but completing her. Joining her in surrender. Neutral ground. "Contact," you whisper, winking.

She almost manages to say it too before you kiss her and her lifeboat-construct melts like snow.


	14. Chapter 14

The Doctor panics when she sees where you've brought her. You're ready for it and hold her tight, moving your lips to her cheek, her ear, then the side of her neck.

"Not here." It's the Vault, of course. It's burning-fresh in your memory, every inch, and it's impregnable to anything but you and the Doctor. Where else? "This is a distraction, you'll get us both killed!"

You stop trying to kiss her. It would've been nice if she'd only gone with it. There's even a bed.

"Well, that lasted all of two seconds," you sigh.

"What did?" Frustrated, angering, she pushes against your shoulders. You hold on, hands behind her back.

"You trusting me."

"Why would I trust you?" Finally, she manages to shrug you off and put some distance between you. One step back, then two, her hands restless for something to do or throw. She clenches her fists instead. "Maybe I'm just past caring what happens to either of us." She bows her head, refusing to look around her, but spilling resentment from hooded eyes. "We had our chance."

"This?" You do look around, letting every barren nook and cranny of the familiar view stoke your fire. You need your rage, now. It's not without purpose, whatever the Doctor thinks. Spreading your arms, you turn in a slow circle, encompassing the tomb you all but died in. "We both _hated_ this!"

"No-one promised it was going to be _easy_."

Ugh, she's... No, there isn't even a word. It just balls your hands into fists and makes you long to swing one of them at a target that can bleed.

"Whatever." Ignoring her for the moment, you take stock of the psychic construct, glancing around at the Vault. Your TARDIS would've been more comfortable, and you gave a split-second's serious thought to choosing the bridge of the _Valiant_ or the Mondasian colony ship out of pure spite. Not Gallifrey, though. She'd die and take you with her if you touched that nerve. "We don't need neutral ground, we need something we can defend. Sorry, Doctor, but a hovel isn't where I make my last stand."

"Not here," she says, shaking her head. She's gone pale, her freckles stark islands on blanched skin. "You can't be you here."

"That's the point. Keep up." You watch her. The Doctor doesn't keep up—just eyes you sideways, reluctant, fearful. She doesn't want to have to fight you, but she will. Look at her. Defensive. Angry. Like it's all about her when you're the one she's allegedly saving. Nothing changes. "I was able to multitask with you and control the Matrix while taking on the Cyberium, and I could still walk and talk. Leave this stuff to the pro, love." Her expression flickers—a moment's doubt as she reconsiders your choice of setting. Nope. Still not getting it. "You really have no idea, do you," you ask, quietly, "what it cost me to survive in here?"

"Missy did that."

"Me."

"Oh, right." The Doctor drops her head back, groaning to herself. You wish her luck in finding the stars up there. You know every mark on that ceiling—every artificial flaw and shadow. "I suppose that's progress. Sort of." Righting herself, she finally looks about her. Unable to wrest control of the situation without risking your lives, she hugs herself to keep her hands out of mischief instead. Bides her time and falls back on words—her weapon of choice. "Though it turned out I couldn't trust you then, either. This—" she indicates the Vault with a sarcastic sweep of both arms "—was all for nothing 'cause you betrayed me anyway. First chance you got."

Your turn to stare. Hair has fallen across the Doctor's face, which she's half-turned away in avoidance of your reality. Or because she can't look you in the eye and say those words.

"What?" You ask the question crisply, concisely, _not_ screaming bloody-murder at the self-righteous bitch. There's no time for that.

"Every chance I ever gave you, you threw back in my face. I should've locked you in here and thrown away the key."

Rage almost blinds you. Almost. But here, this prison, is where you learned to temper yourself with... what's the word? 'Fortitude'? That'll do. It's a quality well over the borderline onto the Doctor's 'acceptable' list, but one that applies equally to the elements of your existence that don't involve her. Being Missy— _here_ —you learned to bend a little, and to wear your disguises beneath the skin. That was fortitude. So is not knocking the Doctor's fucking head off whenever she irritates you.

Your memories of ceasing to be Missy, becoming this instead, are mangled in the trauma of regeneration, but you were a phoenix from those ashes. You rose and soared on fires of fury. You chalked the rest up to experience and used the hot grudge to make yourself a slower kind of deadly.

Look: it ravages the Doctor to have been so wrong. You'd thought, when you thought of it at all, that she must be upset at losing her wing-clipped, tame Missy, but it's not that. Look at her. Look at the Doctor's face when she _knows_ she got something wrong—when there's nowhere she can rest her gaze without seeing a reminder that she put people in danger. Bookmark that memory because it'll be bloody centuries before you see its like again.

She's terrified.

Bringing the Doctor back here might be the best idea you ever had.

"He was right," you realise, Missy's last days unrolling before you with new clarity. You're surprised that you sound surprised.

The Doctor is lost and annoyed.

"Who was? About what?"

"Old me. Prime-Minister me." You laugh, finally, centuries late to the punchline. "He said you'd never forgive me for what I did to your little friend. You haven't, have you?"

The Doctor flinches. It's not just your words—it's physical this time.

"Stop it," she gasps. You feel it too—the building charge, buzzing the Faraday-cage of the psychic bubble. Another storm building out there in the infirmary. You both need to be thinking about how bodies work—how hearts beat and lungs exchange gases. "Not now!"

"Afraid to die, Doctor?" It's bliss to watch her crumble while you spread your wings. "I'm not. I stabbed the smug bastard in the back. Killed him dead." You make a stabbing gesture to reinforce the image.

She's still not getting it. Not quite. Delicious, watching her try.

"What?" There. She gets it. Her eyes widen, child-like. "That's..."

"Crazy?" You laugh. Your crazy laugh. It's never too far away these days, and it makes you feel _good_. It might be another mask. You've never checked. "He was in my way. Let's be honest—he was embarrassing. But if you want the truth of it, I killed him to avenge your 'companion' because I can't _do_ it your way, with platitudes and prayers, and I _won't_ live in the forlorn hope of your forgiveness for being _myself_. I knew you wouldn't thank me for it, but honestly, Doctor. Me, betray _you?_ I died twice-over on that ship in service to your great moral crusade, and what did it get me? Abandoned! _Again!_ "

Hand clawing at her throat, eyes locked with yours, the Doctor can't get enough air into her avatar-body. You could do something about that—reach into the roots of your construct, remind both your real bodies how to survive by making sure the avatars do. But this is just too much fun. She sinks to one knee.

"Not... now..." she chokes. Beautiful sound. It should be your hands around her neck, making her gasp and splutter. You got a real taste for up-close-and-personal, slipping that sprung dagger into your past-self's flesh. That tiny twitch as he barely felt the blade enter—the way he stiffened with dread before congratulating you on a job well done. You've got to hand that one to Missy and let her take a bow—that masterstroke was was worth dying for, once if not twice.

You kneel with the Doctor. Getting hard to breathe yourself—chest tight, head clanging. Physical death bleeding into the mental fortress, eroding your psychic control. You don't have long. Holding the Doctor's gaze, you place your hands around her neck. Just lightly. You finger the marks left by your teeth, thumbs teasing her windpipe, and stare into her eyes.

"Choose your last words carefully," you advise, giving her your bedroom-voice as you lean in closer. "Go on. Oh, come on." Roll the dice. Live or die, you and her. Her choice. "Get it right this time."

Struggling for air, red-faced and turning ugly-purple, the Doctor wraps her hands around two big handfuls of your coat front and pulls herself eye-to-eye with you. Hers are streaming, closing. You slip into her head, embracing her mind, so you'll know if she's lying.

"I'm... sorry... Master."

You close your eyes to concentrate, supporting her shaking body as you focus...focus... and force your bodies to breathe. Hearts beat, not an artificial tick-tick but the four beats that Rassilon carved into your soul. As if you could ever need reminding of that. That's what hell sounds like, and what life sounds like. You and the Doctor sag against each other, all feeble hands and heaving breaths, her hair tickling your cheek.

Fumbling for a firm hold on existence, the Doctor holds your hands. So vulnerable, that hard mask all crumbled away. Wetness on her cheeks, hair sticking to her skin. Is she crying, or is that just because she choked? Doesn't matter. She's perfect, frozen with you in one moment of honesty.

Time should stand still now.

"Am I your prisoner?" She doesn't exactly sound bothered. You get that—know a shattering catharsis when you share one secondhand. You could shape her into something new with a little push at that fragile, resettling psyche. Something else rides on the word, though. 'Prisoner'. It destabilises the Doctor's certainty in this suicidal trust-fall but doesn't reek of accusation. She tries to bury it automatically, a private thing, but you reach after it, catch it by the coattails, drag it around to face you and see... the Doctor trapped between four dark walls covered with tally marks, thrashing to stay afloat on the mindless current of unchanging, timed-to-the-second routine. She knows every inch of that cell, every shadow, every variation of every star in the sky beyond that tiny barred window. They've even taken away her rainbows.

_Oh._

A growl in your throat as you grope for a more articulate response. Your hands caress her back, possessive, reclaiming her body from that memory.

"I'll kill someone for that," you promise, resting your chin on her shoulder. Her head grows heavy, resting against yours. Fighting the pain, holding back death—it's taking its toll on your psychic strength. More on hers. You tighten your arms around her and thread your fingertips through her hair, gripping a bunch of it fiercely. No more time to mess about if you want her to survive. "Now," you say, leaning into her thoughts—interlacing yours with hers, using every last forbidden remnant of the aborted mating bond and every scrap of her tentative goodwill to hold it together. The Doctor lets it happen. "Leave this to the Master."


	15. Chapter 15

Those bodies, Missy-you and eyebrows-him, just weren't made for mindless naughty-jigging, though yours enjoyed being touched. His not so much—all prickles and shivers, ducking and dodging. He'd get bored halfway through a snog and start running transdimensional proofs in his head and calculating the volume of Mars Bars required to meet the calorific requirements of every humanoid in the galaxy a hundred and seven years ago.

He'd go through the motions if you forced the issue, but he'd never relax or unbend. He'd never loved you less, forgiven you less, or felt less of a need for sweaty displacement activity involving your reproductive organs. You were actually quite stung, given how gorgeous you'd turned out that time, but you got the hint and left him to his prickly celibacy. You'd had bodies like that. Probably would again. His loss. He'd never needed you more, after all.

That was before, though—before the confession dial; before someone carved a Clara-Oswald-sized hole in his consciousness that left him, in a way you couldn't define, rejuvenated. Before Darillum and domestic bliss.

 _"The Doc-tor is co-ha-bi-ting with a fe-male on the pla-net Da-rill-i-um,"_ you were told through the door of your cell on Skaro.

"So? What do you expect me to do about it?"

_"Why?"_

"I expect he enjoys all the naughty dirty sex," you confided to the Dalek interrogator. "That's so him. Oh! I could tell you stories. The man's exhausting—an absolute humpy bunny-rabbit once you start him off. My ladybits can hardly stand it. Seriously, darling, if he ever invites you for a candle-lit dinner for two, run the other way. He'll be at it all night."

The Dalek had to go away and consult some very obscure databanks for a while, then. Good luck finding a strategic weakness _there_. (It was Skaro. You had to make your own fun.)

But it got you thinking, especially when you deduced that the fe-male could only be River Song, the wife. _She_ didn't seem the type to take the Doctor's reticence lying down, or in any other position. Maybe Peter Pan grew up a little bit on Darillium?

Or not.

"Pay attention when I'm seducing you," you complained, lying back on your frilly bed in your silk dressing gown.

"Sorry, were you?" The Doctor, sitting nearby, looked up from his book. Smiled, all the way to his eyes. "I thought that was when you shoved me against a wall and forced something up my backside."

Ugh. Fair point, but... ugh. Your other-selves were pigs.

"We're not doing that, then?"

He surprised you—put down his book, came over. Sat. Leaned over you, hands planted either side, and kissed you softly on the brow. His eyes held the smile until he closed them. His delight in your company, whispering against your mind, gave you more of him than you'd ever got from a stolen fumble.

"Not today. Ask me again in nine hundred and fifty years. You never know your luck."


	16. Chapter 16

Burning wreckage, blackened walls and ceiling, the air clogged with smoke. You're lying on your back on the floor, and everything hurts.

The usual, then.

Exception to the rule: somebody lying half on top of you. They're still breathing, every breath perfectly synchronised with your own.

There's blue-white light from another room—enough to let you watch the smoke being drawn in that direction. Slowly, your brain ties the visual to the whirring, urgent sound you can hear. Extractor vent. TARDIS. Corridor.

Lifting your head a fraction, you squint at the head resting on your lower ribs—the fistful of associated hair you're grasping. You open your hand, slowly, and let the captured hair slither free. Its owner is a dead weight on your chest.

"Doctor?" Your speech centre does the work of calling the rest of your faculties to order. You're scattered across the psychic plane—inside the Vault construct, inside the Doctor, and holding on to both the Matrix of the Time Lords and the residue of the dearly-departed Cyberium. Even you have to concentrate to master all that and still surface as yourself. "Doctor. Wake up."

She doesn't. She doesn't die when you carefully let go of her autonomic functions, either. A momentary stutter, then she breathes on her own.

You let your head fall back, a painful thud against the floor.

It was no idle boast you made—you're a psychic adept in this regeneration. You've yet to find the limit of your mental abilities. Should be easy enough to partition off the ghost of the Cyberium somewhere inside your head, so the information stays accessible without threatening to overwhelm you. It thought it could parasitise you, overwriting you engram by engram and cell by cell. Hah! You don't have it all—some of it died with the host entity. A portion requires the distributed processing power of the neural network—that's slipped from your grasp. But you held out long enough to embed much of the Cyberium's knowledge into your memory, cross-referencing the data with your own experience and the stolen secrets of the Matrix.

You've dabbled with cyber-kind for centuries, learning their strengths and weaknesses in the name of repurposing them to your needs. Why did it never occur to you before to skip to the end of the story and steal the last page? A treasure-trove of pure reason and strategy—tens of millennia of accumulated knowledge, utterly unencumbered by emotion. Yours now.

You grin up at the blackened ceiling, watching the last of the smoke get pulled away into the corridor. Idly, you begin stroking the Doctor's hair. Inside her mind, you prod her teasingly towards consciousness.

The Doctor groans, slithering off you and slumping face-down on the floor to your left. She pushes with her hands, but gravity defeats her. She groans again.

"Wakey wakey."

"Hurts," she mumbles. You both have burns, your gowns in blackened tatters.

"You'll live. Say, 'thank you, Master'."

"Get lost," the Doctor sighs. Without shoving you out of the mental link, she wraps both hands around her privacy before you get any ideas about stealing her secrets too.

Yeah, she'll live.

You try your own luck at sitting up, groping for the metal bedframe to your right. Grit-teethed, you manage it and give your body a few moments to accustom itself to being upright. Then you offer the Doctor your hand.

Face mashed against the floor, she eyes your hand warily. Fair enough, you suppose, and offer her your intentions as well. The Doctor gasps to find you so deeply embedded in her thoughts.

"Leave it," you advise. "Come on. Up." With the Doctor clutching your left hand and you clinging to the struts of the bio-bed, you get her sitting up. You try to think of something to say to make her furious, but the Doctor's staring at your hand—cradling it in both of hers. You look down and see the burns, the grey glove all but gone, its last lingering threads strung across your weeping, scorched flesh. You don't flinch, but you loosen your hold on the bed and bring your right hand down for inspection. It isn't as bad as the left. Between you, you and the Doctor ease off the nearly-intact glove and look at the damage. Her shock bleeds into your head, so you raise a barrier against it... more or less.

"Emergency medical," says the Doctor, unsteadily, comprehending that you've toasted her standard sickbay. "The console room's nearest."

"Yeah." You're in no hurry—too outside yourself to feel the pain yet, and too wrapped up in her. That's going to hurt—separating. She's not let you touch her like this in... "Come on."

Stronger with somebody needing her help, the Doctor clambers to her feet first, bending to pull you up after her. Looking like a pair of refugees from one of your more spectacular planetary projects, you shuffle out into the corridor.

"That was insane," you point out, mildly. "Grabbing on like that."

The Doctor doesn't argue. She takes your weight, your right arm across her shoulders, and steers you both in the right direction. Beneath her bare feet, a pathway of fluttering mauve lights matches your route, looking like neon confetti. You've never had that—true symbiosis with a TARDIS. Well, once, briefly, but you drove it insane. Filtered through the Doctor's mind it feels like... home.

"Master—"

"Not now."

"But—"

"Shh." You soothe inside her head, the telepathic shadow of your whisper. Can't have her panicking. How completely did she surrender to you in the mindscape? It's definitely gone far enough that you could do her a lot of harm without really trying. "I won't hurt you." Steps faltering, the Doctor stares at you. Fear of you looks wrong on that face of hers. "I won't. Time out, remember?"

"Yeah." Belatedly, she does. "Right."

You lose the gowns in the moody mauve-blue light of the console room. Yours was doing little to spare your blushes in any case, and hers masks burns on her back, where your hands rested.

Your hands took the worst of it, so the Doctor takes care of that first, parking you on a step and fetching the emergency kit from beneath her console. You're calm, deep in the state of complacency that sometimes passes for contentment, but you have Missy's panic alive in you as the Doctor treats similar injuries to the burns you suffered in the Vault. You let her share the memory—censored, but potent—and watch tears run down her face. Her expression doesn't change, though. She keeps her head bowed over your hands, ensuring that the nanogenes get to work on the worst burns before wandering off into your cells to see what else ails you.

Just for a moment, you think you've broken the Doctor without trying, and realise that you don't have the first clue what you'd do with that Pyrrhic victory. She's kneeling at your feet, naked, and...

A damp smile replaces her frozen expression. "Don't worry," she says. "That'll never happen. I'm still here."

"And yet not fighting me?"

"You're not hurting anyone."

No. No, you aren't. Right now, you're not even hurting yourself—something of a novelty. You never managed it as Missy. Along with that remembered torment, you're living Missy's sentimental yearning for the Doctor's friendship—remembering why you complied with the restrictions of the Vault in the first place. That's been lost to you for... oh, so long. Like you don't know all of yourself. But that's okay—that's what regeneration is for. The immortal life without change would be stagnant and hideous.

"Did you really stab yourself in the back?"

"I really did, yeah." You'd show her, share the glorious twist of that momentary victory—expedient vengeance wrapped in your exasperation with the younger, brilliant you—but she might remember that she despises you if she sees how much you enjoyed the knife. "He killed me right back, though. Probably should've anticipated that, considering."

"We both died on that ship then." This time, you think the tears belong to the Doctor alone. "Let's not do that again."

"Die?"

"Promises we can't keep," the Doctor clarifies.

Oh, right. Those.

When you're as patched up as you're going to be, the Doctor kneels with her back to you, expecting you to treat her burns in return. Some part of you baulks on principle, but it's a part buried deep. You're enjoying the passive mental link too much to shatter it with a cheap shot.

"You could heal yourself," you suggest. Once again, your hands are wrapped, but you can hold a tissue regenerator. Touch her, clumsily. "There's no limit to your regeneration energy."

The Doctor tenses beneath your hand. "Sure about that, are you?"

You were. She isn't—you can see as much in her head. Interesting. You showed her the facts, back there in the ruins of Gallifrey, but left her to draw her own conclusions. Her reluctance looms large in your mind—not quite denial, but she's not embraced any part of the new truth. She's too busy mistrusting the unknowns and worrying at the questions. You had another plan for this, for afterwards. You burned Gallifrey, setting the Doctor free to do what she surely must, but she's spent most of her time since then inside a prison cell.

Funny how things turn out.

Wordless, keeping your telepathic touch neutral, you start the tissue regenerator and get to work on her wounds. The ones visible to the naked eye, anyway.


	17. Chapter 17

Your first step over the Quantum Fold threshold in almost eighty years and there wasn't time to consider the implications of a broken vow. Oh, of course there was time—the bald-judgey-one was ushering you inside a time machine—but you didn't pause to mark the moment, to philosophise. You didn't let yourself consider killing your junior jailer and stealing that TARDIS.

You didn't.

From the look on the Doctor's face when you rescued him from Mars, you might as well have done.


	18. Chapter 18

There's chaos inside the Doctor's head, barely held beneath the surface. You love that about her when she lets you see it. And when she doesn't. Sometimes you think the only difference between you—the only one that should matter, even now—is that she's driven to create order out of the chaos, one self-defeating struggle at the time, while you court chaos for its own sake, knowing it'll win anyway. The universe is fractal madness, blazing, beautiful and hideous, just as it was meant to be. Why fight that? Why even bother denying it? You've tried. It's exhausting.

The Doctor does fight it, though. She always has.

You sit together while your bodies heal, each draped in a thin thermal blanket. You don't touch, don't speak, but the Doctor doesn't leave your side. Her batshit TARDIS's oversensitive mood-lighting begins to fade from warning tones to softer, safer sunlight hues.

If you keep your mind still, this feels how it used to be—back before your lives became a battleground. Silence together, the only two parts of the universe making any sense. An easy delight in simply being. Together.

That's not a word you use often.

This won't last. The Doctor will wake up from this daydream and shake you off. Or she'll anger you, and you'll go for her throat. This never lasts. You're incompatible, matter and antimatter, and you always were. You must've proved that in the Vault, each trapping the other in place. Butterflies on a cork—stuck through the hearts with pins. Going nowhere, getting nowhere. Wastefully crumbling to dust. Doesn't she see that?

There—now you're becoming angry. The quickening pulse, metallic-blood-taste in your mouth. Undirected rage, your drug of choice, your safe space. You didn't want to acknowledge Missy, become Missy, and now you have—she's crept up on you while your denial lay bleeding. Now she's in you, integrated, and a tiny bit of you is lost to doubt. Part of you is back there in the Vault, striving for something that you accept as an impossibility. Part of you is stabbing yourself in the back.

A movement to your left, down beside your knees. The Doctor half-turns herself, gingerly painful still, and touches your knee. Looks up at you, unsure.

"A bit longer?" She swallows, afraid of your answer. She makes that sound like an apology, and like 'I love you'. Same difference, maybe.

Bank the fires. Reserve the rage. You'll need that strength before long but not here, not now. Not when she's looking at you like that—like she sees you, rather than through you into an abyss.

All you had to do to earn this was almost die, and save her life.

Maybe you should try sending flowers next time.

"Bed?"

She wrinkles her nose. "Only if we're sleeping. Look at the state of us. I wouldn't shag us."

You both smile, honest and a bit sheepish, feeling your age and battle-scars. Moments like this can't hold; the universe is dead against it and so, on the whole, are you. There's too much momentum in the things you've said and done, you and the Doctor. It can't be stopped now, that rush towards annihilation, but there's still this in the between times. You can inhabit the eye of the storm together if you both try at the same time. Chaos throws up every variant of life in the end, even the nice stuff. You and the Doctor are perfectly inevitable in every shape, every form, and every configuration.

More time. You need more to sort your head out, settle the Cyberium among your conflicting resources and plan your next move. Can you stand to spend that time here with the Doctor, living the careful dance of her 'interdict'? Probably yes, if she'll fuck you again when it gets too much. It's been too long since she met you halfway on that. You missed it—your uncontested ownership of her. You should say that out loud; show her that inside your head and watch her bristle. She's gorgeous when she's angry—she's ablaze. It only takes a little push beyond indignation to get her there, these days.

"I can see when you're plotting something," the Doctor says, dryly. "Your eyes get all shifty."

You point to your chest with a bandaged set of fingers. Moi?

"What am I plotting, then?" In answer, the Doctor reaches for your thoughts, pulling a face when you block her. It's too easy with how you're connected now—almost an effort _not_ to share what you're thinking. You're not absolutely sure you can make it stop, and you aren't ready to think about that yet. "Now, no cheating. Background noise only. What unspeakable deeds am I planning, Doctor?"

"I hope it's tea and biscuits," she admits. She must be aware of the direction of your thoughts—suggestive, hungry, possessive. She has to be pretty far gone to verbalise that kind of thing, though. To the best of your knowledge, nobody else can get her there. No-one alive, anyway. "Oh! Food. You need fuel." From a contented heap at your feet, the Doctor becomes a whirlwind, wrapping herself in the thermal blanket as if it's a bath towel. You follow her with your eyes and with your mind—the shift from stillness to action, unfamiliar to familiar. She's found something to do so she doesn't have to sit here and think. That's how it starts: how she leaves you.

Busy-busy, barefoot, the Doctor bends at the console and unexpectedly tosses you a biscuit. You catch it with an awkward, two-handed grab, hampered by the gloves and numbing medication.

"Food on the console," you note, more with resignation than anything. It's not the first time you've considered that laying traps and trying to destroy the Doctor is wasted effort—that you need only pull up a comfy chair, make popcorn, and wait for the chaos of her own habits to catch up with her. "Naughty."

"It wasn't me."

"Right."

"Honest, it's not me. She sulks if I even get crumbs on her. It's a present. I think."

When she's dashed out of the room, you go and look, pulling your own blanket around your shoulders. The Doctor's not lying—she doesn't have an ill-advised stash of snacks. Her TARDIS now dispenses individual custard creams from the actual console, instead. When you put a shrouded hand on the mechanism, the lights change colour and flash brighter, the ship's telepathic presence flooding you with hostile 'no'. Like elephants, a TARDIS never forgets if you disembowel it alive. But that's not the issue here, is it? Opening yourself a little further to the Doctor's consciousness, the TARDIS's current, specific resentment decodes into new layers of meaning.

"Jealous much?" You prod a few critical switches for the look of the thing. You nibble the corner of the biscuit and carefully place a crumb on the navigation controls. "I saw the Doctor first, dear."


	19. Chapter 19

He punished you for Mars with a month of silences and monosyllables. The sole consolation—you could tell from his tension that he'd doubled down on his own vow and punished himself too, scared into remembering about consequences. Ashamed.

He didn't give up the new pet, though—you could still smell her daily visits on his clothes whenever he showed his face in the Vault: all printer ink, hormonal youth, optimism and cooking oil.

"Can you bring the human next time? She looks feisty."

The Doctor looked up from the table where he'd been sorting through a fresh delivery of supplies. You watched him look for a monosyllable to warn you off with, eyebrows knitting as his frustration and fear grew.

"Missy..."

You held up a hand—stop right there.

"One more sulky-grumpy monosyllable, just one, and you and I are going to have a blazing row," you informed him, sincerely. Since when were you supposed to be the grownup in this relationship? "And I broke a nail the last time. I didn't set foot on the Earth or Mars—I told the squeaky egghead how to bring your TARDIS _inside_ the Quantum Fold so I could step aboard."

The Doctor swallowed, turning a packet of expensive tea leaves over and over in his hands. So, he didn't know that. Not talking to the egg-fellow, either, then. Idiot! Time was you'd have used that knowledge against him—looked for a crack in the enemy's defences and forced your mischief in there to wedge it wide open.

"You still left the Vault," the Doctor muttered—a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. You'd be _embarrassed_ to call that your enemy.

"Yes, I did. Only a Time Lord could tame a TARDIS tantrum, and you know it. You'd still be on Mars, you and your trusting little friend." It was plain on the Doctor's face: he knew you were right. If there was fault here, it was _his_. "Don't people normally say 'thank you' when you save them?"

"Is that what you think?" The Doctor closed the distance between you in quick strides, coat flapping—provoked into forgetting himself. For a second, you thought he might grab you, shake you. Eyes wild with fear and guilt and confusion—hands waving pointlessly. "That a... a good deed cancels out the wrong you've done? That you get a party with balloons because you chose to do the decent thing for once?!"

Without hope, without witness, without reward. Eighty years, while he spent most of it out there, comforting himself with humanity. You almost slapped him, but you'd just done your nails.

"I was right then. To come and get you from Mars?"

He spluttered for a second, trapped in his own moral logic, wretched in his own failure and fear.

Then you had a blazing row.


	20. Chapter 20

A search through the Doctor's wardrobe gives you time to yourself—time to regroup. In proximity to her now you feel... altered. Tainted? No, not quite. Only changed, the double-awareness of the mind link muting your tendency to unthinking nihilism. If it can do that to you, what's it doing to the Doctor?

You smile, but it feels hollow.

There's Missy, too—a past that you've held at arm's length, distrustful. Regeneration throws up wildcards, be it an altered taste in food and music, the shattering of a lifetime of punctilious daily habits with disorganised clutter, or a radical reaction against the self you've been so far. Raging without thinking, you've had your previous regeneration tagged as all three—considered Missy so not-you in every way that she had to be discarded, incised from your reality and left to burn with the rest of your bridges. You've blamed the Doctor for that hell you lived inside the Vault. You've accused Missy for it, holding on to her pain without the consolation of her— _your_ —immanent clarity of purpose. Now, at last, the blame returns to sender and sits inside your head, waiting for you to process.

It'll have to get in line behind the Doctor and Gallifrey. Maybe you'll get there someday.

Not today. Gallifrey eclipsed everything for so long. Even by your standards, the past decades have been too much about the Doctor. That's a benefit of her 'interdict', though: checking your feud at the door gives you both, perversely, a little me-time. You each seem to need the other's permission for that. To just... stop. To be yourself without reference to the other's misdeeds.

A sigh. Heaviness of hearts stayed with you from the Vault. Never lifts, though it's often subsumed by anger, resentment, jealousy, glee, or unthinking rage. You think you might've bonded grief to your soul for good on the Mondasian colony ship, murdering yourself to find a way to live.

You sort of wish you hadn't told the Doctor about that. Can't have her entertaining any more ideas of saving your soul. Let her save the cosmos from you if she can, if she absolutely must, but not that. Never again.

Momentarily overcome, body and mind together, you rest your forehead against a pillar; press your palms to its coolness and swallow nausea, a lump in your throat. Finished with your burns, the nanogenes have gone to work throughout your system, healing the damage inflicted by the Cyberium. Not a good time for a new rage you've yet to discover and exploit. Its tiring having so many different ways of despising yourself that they need to queue for your attention.

Anyway. Clothes. You recall being irritated when the Doctor made you remove your coat and waistcoat ahead of her attempt to expel the Cyberium. Shedding layers in her presence—that's a thing to be carefully considered, calculated. 'This might not be pretty,' she pointed out, leaving her own long coat in the console room and rolling up the sleeves of her white undershirt. Understatement of the century. You refused to go further—to unmask before she made you suffer. The remaining layers that she stripped off you for the shower are beyond repair. You need new ones. You need your layers.

It all rolls over you—these past days, your trial of fire, the Doctor's bed and body, the exquisite agony of containing the Cyberium until the last possible moment. Too much. Another legacy of the Vault—you need slow time, linear time, to hear yourself think and discover clarity inside the chaos of subjective experience. Captivity conditioned you to slow self-reflection, and you've never let go. Your thoughts go too fast now. There's no healing.

She can't see you like this—the Doctor. Can't let her. You'll allow her to watch as your body betrays you if that's expedient, but not this. Not when the floodgates open and you're drowning in your worst self. _She_ thinks that's when you embark on destruction, when you're wanton and wayward, but the worst of you is this—falling on your knees, on your own, _remembering_. It's Missy begging for death because her life hurts. It's you goading the Doctor to destroy you ( _go on then, do it!_ — _say something nice_ — _become death, become me_ ) because you miss her... you just... _miss_ her... and can't forgive her for always leaving you incomplete.

Time passes. The whirlwind scream inside your head softens to a howl, a blackness behind your eyes instead of blood-burning-red. Your body becomes your own because you remember to breathe—that not all the layers you hide beneath are made of cloth. Masks, disguises. They keep everything out. They contain you and distance you from yourself.

You've crumpled the new shirt—plum cotton-silk with black pearl buttons. You've folded your body around it, hugging it to your bare chest, bent it over your knees. Now you straighten, wiping your face on your forearms. Tears. The weeping didn't start in the Vault—that came before, the you before you were Missy. The first time you discovered the release of tears—a biological pressure-valve for the unbearable. The Doctor's always known how to cry when it mattered. Until now. You can enumerate her tears in single digits now. She begrudges every one.

You did that. She must be screaming inside, so bottled-up.

"Master?"

Turning on your heel, the blanket falling from your shoulders so that you've only the shirt to hide behind, you stare at the Doctor. She's near the exit, fully dressed and half in shadow, her face wet with tears.

_"Go away!"_ you scream at her, but it's futile. Too late, cannot unsee. You forgot about the latent link, or didn't choose to consider it. You forget, even now, that the Doctor's own psychic prowess has become formidable. Even without the mind link, she might have sensed your unscheduled meltdown.

"I can't." The Doctor's voice is steady enough, though quiet with shock. Shock and awe. You've tried so many ways to shut her mouth with those. Was this really all you had to do? Fall apart where she could watch? She takes a hesitant step, then stops herself. Taps her temple. "I can't shut you out. I'm sorry, but if you want privacy, you'll have to..." She stops herself doing that, too—stops talking, just for once, and simply lets you _see_ that she's sorry for sharing your shame. 'Sorry' paints her mind in shades of home—umber and amber shading to smouldering sky-red. For you, the colours all taste like blood and metal.

A shuddering breath. Probably somewhere in your bloodstream, nanogenes are rushing to check your vital functions. You feel that close to dying.

"No. I don't want that." You really don't. Stricken, confused, the Doctor hesitates for a second, then nods. Still the tears run down her cheeks—flowing without her sobbing, as though she's become divorced from the process of grieving. Or maybe that's your pain, and those are your tears on her face. You half turn away, hugging the shirt like a shield, self-conscious of the visual. Sniffing back your disgrace. "Give me a minute here."

Time: you demand it of her. The Doctor simply obeys and gives you some, walking away.


	21. Chapter 21

It should have been you who faltered at the first taste of your freedom, but it wasn't. It was the Doctor.

Maybe it was your tears that broke him. Not the fearful, secret sobbing of the early days inside the Vault, or the noisy hysteria that occasionally drove you to destructive excess and frustrated self-neglect during the intervening years. These were silent tears, ones you could almost-but-not-quite hold back—ones you showed to the Doctor because you needed his help to understand why you couldn't stop crying them. 'This is good', he promised, and you tried to take it on trust. You wanted him to hold you—be strong while you fell apart for a while, but he wasn't. Couldn't. Didn't.

Later, you realised that you'd planted the idea in his mind when you told him how you'd avoided passing through the Vault's doors on your way to Mars. He landed his blue box inside your prison and stepped out of it, smiling the way he used to smile when you ducked out of class together to snog and fumble in some half-secret alcove of the citadel.

You knew his plan before he said a word, just from the look on his face and the relief lightening his psychic aura, and you did try to deflect him before he could make a terrible mistake. You really did.

"If you've forgotten how to open my prison, my dear, I can talk you through the process through the intercom." _I can leave here at any time, and you know that,_ you groaned inside your head. _Don't do this, please... please, don't do this now... Just go, you cunning old fraud, and leave me to rot._ "Or did you get so lazy in your old age that you've given up walking from room to room? It's a TARDIS, not a lift."

Carried away with his brilliant new idea, the Doctor didn't notice your expression, your pleading, fearful eyes. Hovering in the doorway of his TARDIS, he held out his hand in invitation.

"I've biolocked everything. A locked room is a locked room. Come on."

And an artificially-created fold in spacetime is an artificially-created fold in spacetime. Yes, you could see his logic without him spelling it out, thank you very much. You could also see how he longed to be free. _Him_. It'd been a slippery slope ever since he met the new human, hadn't it? You battled temptation from moment to moment, alone in your cage, while he... he began to lose interest in this project the second the human reminded him of what he'd given up to be here with you. _For_ you.

"No. Stop it now. This isn't what we agreed." You were falling, and he kept smiling, oblivious. So pleased with himself.

"I'm changing the agreement. Just don't tell Nardole." He stretched out his arm again, fingers wiggling in invitation. "Also, the oil needs changing, and she's sticking in third. I need your mad Time Lady skills to prevent, uh... tantrums."

TARDIS tantrums, like the one that stranded him on Mars. The Doctor's self-delusional logic was becoming circular.

You tried anger on him.

"I'm not luggage! You don't get to drag me aboard and stack me in a corner because you want to take a trip."

"No, you're a vastly over-qualified temporal engineer with an engine to overhaul. Come on!"

"And your TARDIS loathes me."

"Yeah, I've already had a word with her about not ejecting you into the vortex."

The vortex—the one thing you tried never to think of during the lonely hours (days... months) between his visits. Your universe now comprised four walls, a roof, a floor, and one door. It was about as far from infinite possibility as you could get. If you didn't think about it, then you didn't consciously miss it—all of time and space before you, with you at the still-point, ready to command it and bend it to your will. Thinking about it would've suffocated you, but you'd found a different still point here inside your prison—strived and struggled to reach it because the alternative was drowning in despair. Only then, with the Doctor inviting you to leave it behind, did you recognise the magnitude of your own achievement.

You _had_ changed.

"You'll... you'll keep it grounded, keep it here, while I... fix your engines, yes?" How strong did he expect you to be? Was this a test? He'd done that occasionally over the years—thrown minor temptation in your path to see what you'd do, right up to the time you brandished the latest evidence under his nose, and threatened to stick any future attempts where the sun don't shine. But no. Not this time. He wasn't standing there expecting you to fail.

His fidgeting feet and thinning lips told the truth in silence. He needed to run, to swan-dive into infinite possibility again, and you were the only thing holding him back. Maybe he'd even miss you if he ran without you.

Once, not even very long ago in relative terms, you'd gladly died rather than let him imprison you inside his TARDIS. What had changed? Only him. Only you. Only everything.

Trembling, you went to the Doctor and took his hand. He held yours as if it were precious. You clutched him harder as the certainty of a thousand empty years fell away beneath your feet.

"Is... is this you trusting me, Doctor? Are we friends, now?"

His smile turned soft, private—his eyes full of warmth all for you. At that moment, the Doctor was yours alone and wanted you at his side again. There might have been a kiss if you'd tried, but you didn't need it. Not when he looked at you that way.

"Let's try it for size, shall we?"

Really, it was hardly your fault when it all went horribly wrong.


	22. Chapter 22

It's awkward now. When you fight the Doctor, scheme against her, you do so with abandon—unselfconscious. When it stops, when you're still, you're ill at ease and too aware of your own body; how you move, how you stand, how your skin feels beneath your clothes. What your expression and appearance are giving away. That the Doctor saw you in a state of unravelling just now makes you... self-aware. You don't like it, the exposure of weakness, but tucked away inside you, the facet of you that called herself Missy tosses back her mane and cracks up laughing. _Darling_ , she drawls, adoring you. _The Doctor's seen worse and still loved you._

Funny that the incarnation of you who utterly failed to seduce the Doctor on a carnal level remains the only one capable of talking about love. Missy was nothing if not perverse.

Fetching up your waistcoat and coat, slipping them on and carefully adjusting, buttoning, you place layers between yourself and the squirming disquiet that you're too proud to call 'embarrassment'.

It isn't just yours. Bleeding through the mental link, the Doctor's discomfort rattles you too. She's worried, worn out, resigned to her own inability to resist the temptation of you, but she's so angry—cold fury and dreadful hurt nipping at the heels of her present, wary tenderness towards you.

You wanted that, didn't you? To make her this angry? To see her struggle and lose her grip on being the Doctor? Didn't you?

Watching the Doctor now, you can feel bodily echoes of the rare stick-insect hugs from the Vault—Eyebrows and Missy trying to connect for a moment when words failed, gentle or fierce or desperate. That's not you now—it's no longer the Doctor either. The moment you touched in these bodies, there was a fire like never before, as though upping the stakes and calling this thing between you 'hatred' only adds aphrodisiac spice. You fucked for hours, effortlessly; two loose-limbed, pliable bodies apparently built for nothing less, nothing more eloquent or worthy, than slotting together for mutual gratification. You hated it. You loved it. So did she.

Now it's all elbows again, prickly again, both of you too careful and afraid to move in case something snaps. Tense, wired, the Doctor's sitting and waiting for you on a step, elbows on her knees and hands clasped in front. White-knuckles. Her uncertainty roils against your psychic shielding, such as that is. She wants to do the right thing, the kind thing, and doesn't know what that is.

Slowly, you go and sit on the step just beside hers.

"So," you offer, with gruff honesty. "That happened." You scratch the back of your neck. Sigh.

"Could've gone better," she agrees, pouncing gratefully on the conversational opening. She shifts herself on the step. "I didn't mean to half-kill you. Promise." She studies her hands, expressive mouth hunting for an expression it can live with before the lower lip gets the chance to start wobbling. "Didn't actually mean to kill the Cyberium, either. Not my best work."

"Yeah, I said: you're a terrible doctor." Who does she imagine is going to miss the Cyberium? The Cybermen won't, once they grasp the wasteful inefficiency of being reduced to mere drones under centralised control. Why pack a functioning humanoid brain into a metal suit if you're just going to march it about like a remote-controlled toy? Why bother?

The Doctor manages a little smile. It does nothing to lift her from her sadness. It almost looks like defeat, but that's not how it feels to your telepathic senses; it's much more complicated than that. It's a weight on her, a suffocating pressure she can hardly bear. A lot of uneasy denial, some shame. Some of it's directed at you—because of you and what you've done. A lot of it isn't. You could spend all day picking it apart if she'd let you.

But this open mind link that you're both trying not to think about—it goes both ways. You're transparent too.

"You're not done, are you? With the Cybermen." She at least tries not to sound harsh.

"I might be." You haven't decided. It's possible that what you've learned from the Cyberium has more value than cyber-kind itself. You have options now—you like having options. "They do get your attention, though."

The Doctor's head snaps around, her eyes blazing at you.

"If you want my attention you just have to—"

Your unaffected smile stops her short. Flushing, flustered, she bites her tongue and looks away again. You felt her fury, there—the whiplash reflex of her righteousness, entirely heartfelt but lacking immediacy. Old news, reheated.

"Yes, Doctor? How does one get your attention without being interesting?"

"You've got it right now," she mutters, eyes fixed desperately on her own hands. "Didn't take an army, did it?" It's not the sentiment she objects to sharing—it's the words. Each one costs her, hoisted out of the depths of her with a massive effort. "Just a kiss," she manages, under her breath.

Ah. Wary, you raise your hand and touch her hair, tidying the nearly-dry strands behind her left ear. She used to wear a jewel there, didn't she? You remember noting it when you first came face to face with her—remember being curious to see how she'd change herself (or not) to accommodate her newest body. No great surprise that she'd reverted to her old eccentricity of dress, minus the question-marks and vegetables, but you were taken aback to see so much of her skin exposed. All her other selves were buttoned-up in one way or another, unconsciously styling themselves to accommodate Gallifrey's age-old taboos. It's not the sight of bare skin that shocks a Time Lord—it's the prospect of accidentally touching that skin and sharing a moment of unwelcome, forbidden telepathic intimacy. Well, that, and some of your race's nastier predators had a habit of going for the throat.

"I have you to myself, then?" You trace the blue line of the Doctor's jugular vein with a fingertip. Skin on skin, the mental link becomes solid—almost intrusive. "Your undivided attention? Your time, gladly given? No... distractions?"

You hoped for another display of what your voice can do to her when you use it softly, for seduction. Instead, there's her guilt—a stark, sharp stab of it across her thoughts, attached to images of the same three humans she had when you last met. Now she's down to one and terrified of losing that one too. The Doctor's momentary self-recrimination fractures on a sense of loss, adding a grain more to that oppressive weight she's carrying. Oh, you know how it goes—how it always goes—when they leave her or die, or she runs from them, but there's more to it this time. There's a hot frustration directed at both herself and the unfeeling universe. It's not often you'll get her to admit that she finds the whole thing unfair.

You offer her back the image of the girl—the one the Kasaavin threw back. Warm brown skin, long dark hair, old eyes in a young face. What was her name? She had a great laugh... _Yaz._

"That one's not going anywhere," you predict, confidently. The smitten ones tend to hang on until fate forces their hand, or the Doctor does. "Assuming you don't break her."

"Don't," the Doctor says, and she means it: drop the subject, forget you ever knew there was an Earthling named Yaz. Don't go near her, don't gaze upon her, don't talk about her, don't fish for secondhand thoughts of her. The humans are off-limits, guarded. Precious. You back off, smoothing over the intrusion with a caress of the mind. The Doctor's eyes flutter closed, relief and pleasure combined with puzzlement and a sickly nervousness. "Are we stuck like this?"

"Dunno." Back to toying with her hair, fingertip-light, you attempt to cut yourself off from her mind. It seems the connection can be muted, filtered, but it takes an effort and doesn't come close to severing the link. "Oops?"

"This is serious. Don't take this the wrong way—actually, do—but there are times I _really_ don't want you knowing what I'm thinking."

You grin.

"I expect proximity is the key. Touch." Your knuckle brushes her cheekbone, and she leans into it, just a fraction. "We got in pretty deep. Broke all the rules there." Superlative sex, though. You shiver pleasantly, remembering, while her hair slides between your fingers as a tiny, tactile reminder. Probably you should be bothered by the notion of the Doctor having access to your mind, be it temporary or permanent, but she isn't fighting to stop one of your plans, here; she won't go on the offensive otherwise. You're inclined to view an unexpected development as a fresh opportunity. You stand up, careful not to tax your healing body just yet, and eye the controls of the Doctor's TARDIS. "Let's take a little trip."

You're moving down towards the console before the Doctor catches on. Your hands move faster than her feet, taking command of her TARDIS. This one needs a firm hand—to remember that it's being piloted by a Time Lord.

"Let me," the Doctor protests, coming after you. Her hearts aren't in it. She can _feel_ that you don't have a dastardly plan, and that you have no intention of upsetting her touchy TARDIS. "I don't want to leave here," she sighs. "I was gone too long, left my friends for too long, and..."

"Short hop," you declare, cutting her off. The mind link may be soothing, calming, predisposing you to explore the rusty old fondness with her rather than hating her guts, but you're not up to commiserating with her about the bloody pets. The Doctor's TARDIS briefly fights you, until you lower your mental defences and let it see how much of the Doctor is in you right now. The Doctor is compliant, if uncertain. That settles any dispute, and you smoothly shift the cranky old ship a couple of hundred miles southwest.

"Nicely done," the Doctor admits, hovering at your shoulder as the landing barely jolts you. "She hates doing the short hops."

"It's not supposed to have opinions. It's supposed to take you where you want to go."

"Which is?"

"Where d'you think?" You catch the Doctor's eye and smile, eyebrows raised in challenge.

Her worried frown resolves into a textbook jawdrop. "Oh..."


	23. Chapter 23

Musty air greets you, smelling like the unvisited mausoleum the Vault was meant to be. The ventilation system kicks in when you step out of the Doctor's TARDIS, freshly recycled air blowing in at the vents. There are spots where you can stand and feel the artificial breeze tickling your skin and stirring your hair. You know them all.

The Doctor gives you the silence. You expected her to argue or bluster, ask questions, but there's only the soft scuff of her boots against the illusion of wooden floorboards and the sound of her breathing. In this place, your body remembers how it feels to strain for the sound of a pin dropping.

The landing was perfect. The Doctor's TARDIS stands beside the octagonal dais with its grand piano.

Nothing's changed. You've wondered if the Doctor ever came back here—to look for you, or to mourn you. Everything is as you left it the day the Doctor stood at the TARDIS doors and broke your promises with his smile. The Doctor, as she is now, would never be such a fool.

Seventy, eighty years... That's nothing in biological time to a Time Lord. That's a mini-break, an extended Netflix marathon. Subjective time, though— that's different. In this place, you discovered ordinary hours that dragged like years and minutes that lasted for days, the laws of physics tangling with your inner struggle to make the worst possible moments of your life last an eternity. Then afterwards, when you were with the Doctor in his TARDIS, there wasn't enough time.

You're breathing fast and shallow, your body remembering panic and surrender. The Doctor comes to your side, trying to contain her concern. Failing.

"So much of me died here, Doctor," you say—or mean to say. It comes out in a whisper, hushed by memory. "Why can't I leave it behind?"

As if she'd know. The Doctor is the walking definition of leaving things behind. Grabbing blindly, you capture her left hand and hold tight. It's all you wanted when you were stuck in this place and dissecting yourself to death; just the Doctor's hand to hold so you didn't face the darkness alone. Her acknowledgement of your sacrifice—that you were the one moving mountains. Can you forgive her for not budging an inch? Feels like the wrong question, but you don't know the right one. The Doctor's hand feels small, curling around yours and squeezing back, but she anchors you with all her strength. You pull yourself together—you didn't come here to tumble into the past.

"You can leave," the Doctor says. For once, she says the right thing—the exact thing you need to hear. "It's just a room now." She sounds slightly surprised and a bit worried; feels fragile against your thoughts, as if she's teetering on the same precipice as you.

"No. I'll stay for a bit." You might be capable of getting out, but only you and the Doctor could possibly get _in_ here. This is safety of sorts. Whatever you do next... well, you intend to make sure that the decision is your own. Too much going on inside your head, too much at odds. You prefer your conflicts to remain external, and the last moment of actual peace you can remember was right here—that last day. The book you were reading when the Doctor arrived in his TARDIS is where you abandoned it, broken open over the scrolling arm of a wrought-iron chair.

The sound of your own breath captivates you, uneven and unsteady. Dry mouth. Nervous perspiration on your palms and upper lip. What's that all about?

The Doctor leans her weight lightly against your arm, pressing your hand. "Can I stay?"

"Yeah."

Anchored, you stand there for a while, breathing in sync and listening to each other's silence. If you don't fight it, your thoughts flow together naturally, not unlike the improvisational dance your minds did when you were kids, when you rebelled against the touch-taboo at every snatched opportunity. Before... everything. Before it got ruined, corrupted, and before you found out that even this much was a lie.

"That's still us," the Doctor declares, tugging your hand until you move to face her. "Whatever's happened since. Whatever you've learned about me, that life we shared is all I know. You'll always be part of me..."

"Whatever I've done?" Finishing each other's sentences used to be fun.

"We've done." The Doctor wraps her other hand around yours, pulling yours to her chest. Unthinking, you open your fingers to feel her hearts beating beneath your palm. In her mind, you see what she can't say. When she burned Gallifrey, she was sure she was right. So sure of it. It's not forgiveness, but there's a part of her, buried deep and nearly always denied, that does understand how your disgust at what you found in the Matrix turned to genocide. She knows what it feels like to snap, suddenly and wholly and righteously, and burn everything in sight because you need something to be pure. The concept excites you, fire in your blood; it repels her, a sick twist in her guts. But you both remember doing the deed. Destroying Gallifrey. The rest is semantics—a discipline over which you and the Doctor will undoubtedly argue until the stars go out. Even she can resign herself to that.

Hesitant, not sure it's wanted or welcome, the Doctor leans in and brushes your lips with hers. _Missed you_ , is written through her mind, impressed on yours with the kiss—the thought not quite resolving itself into the precision of spoken language. Closing your eyes, you glimpse the Vault as it exists in the Doctor's memory and the emotional baggage carried with it. Even if you'd made no effort to change, even if you'd been no danger to anyone, putting you in a box and guarding the door would've had some fundamental appeal for the Doctor. She wanted you, wants you. Will always need you to complete her or cancel her out. Between the two of you, if you only let it happen, there can be... balance. Symmetry.

Slightly sheepish, you raise your hands to indicate the surroundings; meet the Doctor's gaze sort of sideways, as if you've grown shy. Maybe you have. It's much harder to look her in the eye when you're not busy hating her.

"This could get messy," you warn with a lopsided smile. "I typically do not deal well with my triggers, and this place—" The sly, shy smile becomes a grin and a chuckle—daring her, luring her. She loves danger. "Sure you want to stay for that?"

"Yeah." The Doctor can't manage to match your smile, though your dare adds playful top note over her subdued, weary thought processes. It fades in a moment. "I'm so tired," she confesses. "And there's nobody else I can tell because they need me, or they look up to me, or they'll—" She wrings her hands. Swallows, uncomfortable with how she blurted that out—how a whine turned so very, very angry before she stopped herself. That's her true, dark secret of course; not a lost identity, a hidden past, but that her rage is as vast, as bottomless, as deadly as yours behind that friendly face she insists on wearing. If she doesn't watch herself from moment to moment, her anger might get out. Make her capable of anything.

You really did think she might kill you for Gallifrey. You hoped, though the victory would be all too brief, to see her fall in flames as she willingly joined you in hell. You'll take her there if you must, if there's no other way to have her with you, but only you. Nobody else gets to show her the way down, to scar her soul—there's nobody else who's earned that right.

"Time out, then," you say, flatly. Carefully.

"I will if you will."

You know precisely what you've done to her. What else is weighing her down like this? You intend to find out and then hurt it—a lot.

Slowly, showing her your empty hands first, you turn back the collar of her coat to expose the left side of her neck. No marks left—not even the hint of a healing bruise, now. You huff, unsurprised but displeased. Nanogenes never mind their own business.

Flustered, the Doctor twists and puts her own hand there while you think how to go about replacing the mark—whether to kiss her throat again right now, or sneak up on her and bite, or fuck her until she begs you to leave her some fresh proof that she loves you. The Doctor's thoughts don't head for the gutter quite as eagerly as yours, it's more a gently winding path for her than a plunge, but other bits of her bypass common sense and go primal. You share the flutter low in her belly, electrifying and shivery. Delicous.

"I'm not even touching you. And here was me thinking you might be immune to my charms this time, too," you laugh, nudging the Doctor with a reminder of Missy, bored and reclining on the bed, ignored. You mean it in fun, as a shared memory that neither of you should find controversial, but the Doctor tilts her head, dredging up her own recall of the incident to compare with yours. Frowning, concentrating. She lacks your telepathic finesse, the fine control of specific detail: she needs to place her hand against your face to show you... his yearning. Stick-insect-Doctor with the scary eyebrows, longing for you even as he turned you down flat. Waiting for you, only you, and steeling himself against temptation so as not to slow your long journey out of the darkness. Waiting for there to be trust enough to let you unmake him with a kiss. He expected that it would only take one, when the time came. When the trust came.

"Oh," you manage, peeling the Doctor's hand away from your cheek before it gets too much. _Ask me again in nine-hundred-and-fifty years, you never know your luck_. You nod stupidly, belatedly understanding that the Doctor _meant_ that. "You could've said!"

"I didn't know I needed to." The Doctor grips your lapels, shaking her head with a hint of the pitying look she saves for the terminally stupid—a dash of her old, manic energy and brilliant fire. "Thought you were clever. Did you stop being clever when you stopped being a woman, is that it?" She grins now, shuffling back out of your reach as you grab for her, a growl and a laugh trying to coexist at the back of your throat. A moment later, the Doctor lets you win, capturing her with your arms around her waist. She throws her arms around your neck, kissing you hard before you can kiss her first.

"Be gentle," you smirk when she lets you use your lips for anything besides kissing her. "Invalid, here. Death's door and all that."

"Bed," she answers, already pulling at the buttons of your shirt and backing you towards the iron bedstead. Her eyes: wild. Her thoughts: reckless abandon. Like the old days when it was pure between you.

"Doctor's orders?"

"Something like that." She unbuttons your trousers and gives you a gentle push backwards, leaving you sitting amongst Missy's frou-frou bedding—the pink coverlet, the eyelet lace trims, the ribbons. Staring at you, bright-eyed and with clear intent, the Doctor toes off her boots. She's wearing rainbow socks.

You're hard already, startled into reaction by the sudden assault on your senses. Even when the Doctor comes to you requesting her interdict, she's shy of being the aggressor in any physical sense. She needs you to drag her desire out into the open, expose it to her as the inevitability it is before she'll give herself permission to _feel_ with you. You of all people (but only you, only ever you). It can only ever be despite herself, despite everything, but for a little while, you can have this. Have her to yourself. Feel that there's somewhere you belong.

Lying back on the bed, you draw her down on top of you. You're both craving bare skin, closer telepathic contact, but your clothing is easier to dislodge than hers. Straddling you, she's exposed your chest before you manage to push her coat from her shoulders; she's unzipped your fly before your trembling fingers unfasten her braces. It dawns on you that you're genuinely off your game, here—that it would've been wiser to sleep a while, finish healing, before indulging in this. Not that it's difficult getting her off, in this regeneration, but she's inside your head. She might be insufferable if you can't pleasure her to your usual exacting standards.

"Performance anxiety?" The Doctor wrinkles her nose at you, breathing hard. She saves you the job and strips her twin tops off, dropping the rainbows onto the floor. Her boring white bra follows to leave her torso gloriously naked, but you can't take your eyes off her puzzled frown. "That's new."

"So's this," you point out, showing her, mind to mind, that she's never been this way, even when you _knew_ she wanted to pin you to the nearest flat surface and selfishly screw your brains out. There've been other times when you've played with the mating bond—when the sex was unbelievably good and stimulated your physiology to produce the right chemicals to let it start—but you've never let it develop so far, or stuck around long enough afterwards to try it as foreplay. It feels... easy. Good. It's like... It feels like...

The Doctor's expression softens. Saddens.

"Trust," she says, as kindly as she can. "It's not a dirty word." To stop you overthinking that, she lifts herself up long enough to push her trousers and underwear down.

"Shortcut?" Crawling after her, you eye the hairy apex of her thighs with shameless lust. You'll admit there's novelty value involved. Wordless, she plants her backside amongst the frilly pillows and lets you pull her trousers the rest of the way down. You leave the stupid socks where they are. "I like it."

"Trust as a shortcut to gratification," she sighs, reaching to touch your head as you push her legs apart and urge her to raise them so you can get in there. "Telepathy as a shortcut to trust. Ever the pragmatist, Master."

"Whatever works, love." You bury your face in her cunt, kissing first, then searching out sensitive spots with the tip of your tongue and coaxing out her juices. You want to know every brand new inch of her. _This works for me_.

And her. You lose yourself in the taste of her, the silky flesh of her inner labia and the swelling bud of her clit—landmarks you can conquer with her full and surprisingly vocal approval. She holds your head with both hands, none too gentle, trying to concentrate hard enough to reflect every sensation right back at you—make it yours as well. When you do the same, giving her your frustrated and hasty arousal back along with the taste of herself, she shudders and shies away from the contact. Too much, and not in the good way. Overwhelmed. She hasn't enough discipline. You could teach her a thing or two, you suppose, resting your cheek against her inner thigh and watching your fingers slide inside her. You owe her a few life lessons from the last time you were here.

"I'm gonna," she gulps almost immediately, clenching around your two fingers when you crook them slightly, her mind nearly dissolving into the white noise of need. She groans when you take your hand away before she can come—before she pulls you over the edge with her. "Why'd you stop?"

You don't answer her, busy with your clothing—getting your trousers down far enough that she can use your cock for what she needs. What you need.

"Do it now," you hiss, lying back and holding your cock ready for her. She straddles you again in silence, but you can feel her trying to figure this out with the fraction of her brain still capable of intelligent thought—worried that you're not okay, that she's done something wrong, that this is going someplace she's not heard about yet, let alone tried before. You laugh to yourself as she takes your cock, the pleasure curling your toes in your shoes. There's probably plenty you can show her if she'll trust you—even if you have to borrow trust from the psychic ability to see a trap coming a mile off.

This isn't one—you just don't want to spill your cum before you get inside her. The Doctor feared that Missy's kiss would unmake him. This unmakes you. Every time, every configuration of bodies. These are the short, desperate moments when you truly live. You refuse to waste them.

Clarity and precision are lost in the mind link as arousal builds, but you can both feel everything the other does—you couldn't prevent it if you tried. You join hands, lacing your fingers together; you let the Doctor brace her weight on your palms to hold herself at the perfect angle to rise and fall, to rock, to feel your cock. That long hair gets in her face, hides her from you. There's half a dresser drawer somewhere to your right, stuffed with every kind of grooming apparatus known to woman. You'll have to introduce the Doctor to the concept of a scrunchie before you do this again—or just pin her on her back, so the hair frames her face while you... yes...

You lose control. Should be too soon but your orgasm triggers hers—a symbiosis of throbbing pleasure where you both feel the inside and the outside, the grasping and the spurting, the heat and the fullness and the wetness. Neither of you has breath to spare for a cry—this is way beyond all that. This is the opposite of hell. This is worth living for.

The Doctor slumps over you, panting in your ear—heaving breaths and hopeless attempts at words. You don't try to speak. You pull her down, belly to belly with you, desperate for the taste of her mouth. Impatient, you don't wait for enough breath. Kisses, clumsy and incredible, drag the joining out just that little bit longer, keeping everything else at bay. Everything else is hell, everything beyond these walls, but for this moment, the Doctor keeps you safe.

Silence as artificial twilight falls across the Vault. Four hearts slowing. Cooling bodies. A grapple softening into a cuddle with your head on the Doctor's chest. She plays with your hair and explores your beard, showing you her simple fascination with the unremarkable sensation.

"You used to laugh at my beard," you remember, comfortably drowsy—almost content.

"This is a proper one."

"Like you'd know."

"I've had beards! Proper ones!"

Silence again for as long as you can bear it.

"How long?"

"Mm?" The Doctor's falling asleep. You tap her belly with a demanding fingertip. "What?"

"How long will you stay?"

"How long will you?" A sharp intake of breath, the Doctor's body tensing as if she plans to sit up. She doesn't, though. "Oh, I'll have to phone Yaz. Poor Yaz. I sort of told her I had a date with me in the TARDIS. I could hardly say you'd turned up."

You're so mellow right now that even the mention of her favourite human doesn't ruffle your mood. You frown though, not quite believing your ears.

"You explain yourself to them?"

The Doctor hesitates. Goes back to stroking your hair, slowly. "Not usually."

Your personal hell may be held at bay, but the Doctor's is crawling back—crawling right into bed with you. The world will want her back soon. It will always pull her away from you.

"So, how long will you stay?"

"As long as you need. Not as long as I want."

"A thousand years?"

"Would that help?" She tries to focus, but the past days are catching up with her. No. It's more than days. It's years. It's those exhausting decades in a prison cell, the ones that somebody, somewhere, is going to be very sorry for when you lay hands on them. "No," the Doctor sighs, following the thought you just had. She's too tired to respond with more than token displeasure, just as you're too weary to do any more than imagine bloody revenge. "S'pose not. One day at a time then."

"Yeah." Gathering her closer, flipping a corner of the duvet over you both, you stare moodily at the darkening corners of the Vault. She's right: it's just a dreary room now. Nothing special. It has no hold over you. And you have what you wanted, every day you were here before: you have the Doctor at your side. Does that make a difference? Would a thousand years of this change you enough to let contentment last? You sigh and close your eyes, letting the Doctor's mind wrap yours in sleep. "One day at a time."

Maybe, if you both try, you can turn that into time enough.

**END**

**Author's Note:**

> **Transformative Works Statement (a work in progress itself)**
> 
> **My Words: Hands Off!**  
>  Reuse/redistribute/republish/archive/publish/translate/record my words for an audience? You need my written permission for anything more than short, fair-use excerpts, as would be appropriate to academic or media publications (think book reviews, literary citations). If it's marked WIP, my answer will always be 'no'. Taking my words anyway then expecting me to consent afterwards because it's a done-deal is ugly, and has happened more times than I can live with already. Don't.
> 
>  **Your Own Fanworks: Enjoy!**  
>  Anything you can create from scratch yourself based on my works/ideas/characters/worldbuilding/etc? Fine with me as long as you aren't making money from it. You may reproduce appropriate sections of my written dialogue if your fanwork strictly needs it - for example, a remix of a specific scene based around the same script. No need to credit/link, but please do cover your butt against unfair accusations of plagiarism if your work ends up looking anything like mine.


End file.
